Does using tags instead of " " good for SEO purposes?
-
I'm currently using <pr>tags for paragraphs and came across an article that said it is better for search engines to see the</pr>
tag than
tag to separate paragraphs. -
You can see that from the W3schools article I linked above: "Even if
works in all browsers, writing
instead is more future proof."HTML worked with the idea that certain tags could be opened but did not need to be closed such as the and
tags. The XHTML standard requires all tags be closed. As I understand the idea, it's just a better means of presenting that every tag is closed.Functionally there is currently no difference BUT it can lead to different behaviors in various browsers if you use invalid code.
-
The HTML5+ will in some years (maybe 5-6 yrs) only support
and similiar tags. You can read more about this at http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp -
Whats the difference?
-
I must say that you absolutely should use
instead of- it's more future-friendly.
-
Where did you get this information though?
-
I was just wondering if any one at SEOmoz has ever heard about it because I couldn't find anything else on the subject online. This was a very helpful answer thank you.
-
I have never heard that theory before today. It does make a bit of sense so I decided to Google it. When I typed in "p tag vs" the auto-complete came up with "p tag vs br tag" and I added in "seo" to the search. There were only two related results.
1. http://www.seo-works.com/p-tags-in-seo.php While the article presents an interesting idea, they offer absolutely no references for the discussion at all. The author's name is not listed, no date, etc. This is where I begin to look at the site itself and it seems like a "build your website in 30 minutes" type of creation where I keep the idea (good ideas can come from anywhere) but I lend absolutely no weight to this article as evidence.
2. http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/br-hr-p-pre-tag-seo This page isn't that great either, but it is a huge improvement over the other result. We can see an author name "TraiaN" but it is not a link and there is no information about the author. It has a publish date of Nov 2010 which is good.
What bothers me is the information is presented as factual. It is presented in the same was as if I was to say "the sun is hot". Sure the sun is hot. Everyone knows the sun is hot. But I am not willing to accept the theory that p tags are superior to br tags on the same level.
The second site does reference a search patent from 2004 as evidence to support the statement. The particular section of the patent that is referred to only talks about the desire to apply weighting to words near header tags (h1-h6). Never once is the p tag nor br tag mentioned.
These type of articles really muddy the SEO world by presenting one person's theory as a fact. Neither author has presented even one shred of evidence to support this theory. Neither claimed to have worked at Google and seen the algorithm or have performed any testing. There is no evidence whatsoever that either author has any knowledge about SEO. This is the SEO equivalent of snake-oil sales.
Summary: I am not aware of any evidence linking any weighting to text contained within a
tag versus text separated with a
tag. I suggest you use the best programming practices within your site. Follow the W3 industry standards when coding your site and use tags appropriately. -
tag is the proper formatting for paragraphs and will in theory make it easier for search engines to understand your content.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Understanding Redirects and Canonical Tags in SEO: A Complex Case
Hi everyone, nothing serious here, i'm just playing around doing my experiments 🙂
Technical SEO | | chueneke
but if any1 of you guys understand this chaos and what was the issue here, i'd appreciate if you try to explain it to me. I had a page "Linkaufbau" on my website at https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau. My .htaccess file contains only basic SEO stuff: # removed ".html" using htaccess RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.*)\.html\ HTTP RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ $1 [R=301,L] # internally added .html if necessary RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$ RewriteRule (.*) $1\.html [L] # removed "index" from directory index pages RewriteRule (.*)/index$ $1/ [R=301,L] # removed trailing "/" if not a directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$ RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301,L] # Here’s the first redirect: RedirectPermanent /index / My first three questions: Why do I need this rule? Why must this rule be at the top? Why isn't this handled by mod_rewrite? Now to the interesting part: I moved the Linkaufbau page to the SEO folder: https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau and set up the redirect accordingly: RedirectPermanent /linkaufbau /seo/linkaufbau.html I deleted the old /linkaufbau page. I requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau in the Google Search Console. Once the page was indexed, I set a canonical to the old URL: <link rel="canonical" href="https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau"> Then I resubmitted the sitemap and requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau again, even though it was already indexed. Due to the canonical tag, the page quickly disappeared. I then requested indexing for /linkaufbau and /linkaufbau.html in GSC (the old, deleted page). After two days, both URLs were back in the serps:: https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau.html this is the new page /seo/linkaufbau
b14ee095-5c03-40d5-b7fc-57d47cf66e3b-grafik.png This is the old page /linkaufbau
242d5bfd-af7c-4bed-9887-c12a29837d77-grafik.png Both URLs are now in the search results and all rankings are significantly better than before for keywords like: organic linkbuilding linkaufbau kosten linkaufbau service natürlicher linkaufbau hochwertiger linkaufbau organische backlinks linkaufbau strategie linkaufbau agentur Interestingly, both URLs (with and without .html) redirect to the new URL https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau, which in turn has a canonical pointing to https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau (without .html). In the SERPs, when https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau is shown, my new, updated snippet is displayed. When /linkaufbau.html is shown, it displays the old, deleted page that had already disappeared from the index. I have now removed the canonical tag. I don't fully understand the process of what happened and why. If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful. Best regards,
Chris0 -
Our rankings for "Tree Service" dropped last month
Hi, we've had a page www.savatree.com/tree-service.html which was ranking top 1-12 on the google rankings but has complete dropped out. We don't have any duplicate errors from that page on here. Do you have any suggestions? We do rank highly on Bing and Yahoo (1-2 pages). We can't figure whats going on.
Technical SEO | | SavATree0 -
Who uses WordPress Tags anymore?
Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags. I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay2 -
NOFOLLOW Links: Can we 100% ignore them for SEO purposes?
Some SEO articles say we can completely ignore NoFollow links. Other articles say they still matter - but then are very vague on what they count for or against. So which is it really? I do realize that they can provide traffic, and for that they are worthwhile. But it is SEO I am asking about... The SEO purpose I am most concerned with is the Link Profile. Separating the Follows from the NoFollows often gives really different anchor text distributions. If they don't matter, why do MOZ and other SEO Analysis programs still include them in their standard reports? (I can see some benefit to having them as part of the in-depth reports) So what's your thoughts? Can we 100% ignore the NoFollows for our SEO analysis?
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Rel="no follow" for All Links on a Site that Charges for Advertising
If I run a site that charges other companies for listing their products, running banner advertisements, white paper downloads, etc. does it make sense to "no follow" all of their links on my site? For example: they receive a profile page, product pages and are allowed to post press releases. Should all of their links on these pages be "no follow"? It seems like a gray area to me because the explicit advertisements will definitely be "no followed" and they are not buying links, but buying exposure. However, I still don't know the common practice for links from other parts of their "package". Thanks
Technical SEO | | zazo0 -
Research for "love quotes"
I'm doing some research for the term "love quotes" I'm trying to understand why following URL is ranking so high quote-monster.com/category/love-quotes/ it only has one link? Any advise would be appreciated. Rgds Mark
Technical SEO | | relientmark0 -
Canonical Tag
Does it do anything to place the Canonical tag on the unique page itself? I thought this was only to be used on the offending pages that are the copies. Thanks
Technical SEO | | poolguy0