I've recently attempted to remove all useless whitespaces/linefeeds/linebreaks from my HTML code and apparently as a result my site got delisted/google ranks dropped dramatically (from top10 to surely out of top100). Is whitespace removal a bad SEO practice or could it be that my pages had a keyword density that was too high after whitespaces were removed?
A:
HTML is white-space independent - as long as you have valid HTML it doesn't matter if it has whitespace or not. Just look at the source of Google.com.
So check that your HTML validates and that you havent created something that is completely un-parseable. If Google can't parse it they cant read it and they cant rank you.
Adam Pope
2009-04-09 12:55:36
My HTML validates as proper XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the DOCTYPE is reported accordingly. Any other suggestions?
emaster70
2009-04-09 14:59:23
A:
Removing unnecessary whitespace will reduce the loading time of your web-page which is very positive.
I don´t think that the whitespace removal affected your ranking, it must have been something else. Have you done any other updates lately?
As Adam mentioned, look at Googles source code, they have removed all whitespace to save loading time.
Tommy
2009-04-14 20:00:16