I am looking for information regarding tabs, spaces, and line-breaks in HTML/XHTML markup and whether it affects SEO.I have found sources which state that extra white space hurts search engine optimization.Example:<div>    <p>        Text for a paragraph    </p>    <p>        More text for another paragraph    </p></div>Should be written like this for SEO:<div><p>Text for a paragraph</p><p>More text for another paragraph</p></div>The second version of the code is much harder to maintain so I would far prefer to write code like the first example, but SEO concerns are the top priority.Does white space negatively affect a site's search engine rankings?Also, if you have any sources for your answer, please post them or explain your reasoning if you are the source.
Do tabs, spaces, and line-breaks in HTML markup affect search engine optimization?
seo;html;search engines
According to this SEO blog entry, which is transcribing what the head of Google's webspam team Matt Cutts says in the Video, no. We really dont care that much. Were pretty good that anytime we see white space, well separate stuff and we can ignore white space. It really doesnt cause us a lot of harm either way.  The only thing to really pay attention to is where I have seen some really sneaky people who will try to do hidden text or whatever and theyll start off their HTML with like 60 new lines. So whenever you view source code youre like, Man, its blank, there is no source. Whoa dude you just blew my mind. And anybody who is savvy is like, or I can use the scroll bar and see whats down here.It wouldn't make any sense, either.