Empty Lines in HTML source bad for seo? [closed]

Question

I prefer to write my HTML clear, so I may use empty lines here and there - example:

<div>

    <!-- Seasons -->
    <table class="giantTable">
        ...
    </table>

    <!-- Prices -->
    <table class="giantTable">
        ...
    </table>

</div>

Today my new workmate told me that this is bad for SEO, because Google would need more time for parsing the site and may abort with a timeout.

I never heard about this, shall I really write Spaghetti-Code again?

Answer 1

Google do use page-load and rendering time as one metric (of over 200!) for determining your page-rank, so to an extent your colleague is right (although timeout's are not the issue - he is wrong on that).

However, you can have the best of both worlds :) Write your HTML as you normally do, and then minify it before deployment.

Note that there are a number of tools for analysing your site performance (both online, and as browser plugins - e.g. YSlow), and it's a very sensible thing to do. You can have numerous bottlenecks in your web-site, and can often get some quick wins that significantly improve the responsiveness of your site.

As always with optimisation though - measure first! Don't just randomly implement supposed improvements until you have measured the bottlenecks, and then confirmed the improvement is an improvement.