We really don’t care that much. We’re pretty good, anytime we see a white space, we’ll separate stuff. We can ignore white space – it does cause us a lot of harm, either way.
The only thing to pay attention to is, I have seen some sneaky people who will try to do hidden text or whatever, and they’ll start their HTML with 60 new lines.
So whenever you view source, you’re like ‘Oh man, it’s blank! There is no source! WOW, dude, you just blew my mind!’
Anybody who is savvy will use the scroll bar and see what’s down here.
I would just use whatever white space is reasonable for you. I think clean HTML with some nice indentations and all that sort of stuff; it looks good, makes your site more maintainable, it makes it easy to upgrade, to see what’s going on with your source.
Google does a very good job of finding separators and breaking it.
Don’t make one word for every 200 blank lines, but otherwise, as long as you’re doing normal, reasonable stuff, I wouldn’t worry about it.
I’d do whatever is best for you as you’re maintaining your site.
Related posts:
- Is over-optimization bad for a website? Ex – excessive use of nofollow.
- Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page.html versus site.com/folder/page) have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs?
- We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?
- “Query deserves freshness.” Fact or fiction?
- What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design), sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.
