SEO query - <p>&nbsp;</p> tags undesirable?

[PsychomIKE]

Hi, working on a website and something just occured to me.

If you style your paragraph tags to have no border or margin and then rely on <p>&nbsp;</p> to give a line break between paragraphs where necessary would this have a detrimental effect on SEO in anyway?

It seems to me that if spiders are looking at all the h1 & p tags, etc, then these are going to dillute page relevance. Then again maybe they just ignore them.

Mike

 

[GravyMonster]

I don't think it would affect SEO so much if at all, but it's bad practice.

If you can I'd change your markup so that you remove your empty Ps, and then add a class to the P tags which require a line break which puts some padding on the bottom of them.

 

[suarve]

Yer, for a quick fix you could set a spacer div - giving it a height and setting clear to both E.g. <div class="spacer"></div>. The more semantic way would be to set margins on the p tag.

 

[Tripnologist]

A p tag should be used for paragraphs only so it only makes sense to have bottom margin on it. I have it on my base template so I just set the margin to whatever my line-height is so it keeps the flow.

As above, I don't think your spaces will effect anything but it certainly is sloppy and lazy.

 

[PsychomIKE]

Thanks for the comments guys I realise it's not the best way to do things but I'm working with existing CSS on a company CMS system :-/