Is 'tagless' text ignored or downplayed by the google spiders?

To get higher text to HTML ratio is it okay to write tagless text?

[funandgames]

Is 'tagless' text ignored or downplayed by the google spiders?

Example

<h1> Blue Widgets</h1>
Find out about widgets here. We offer all types of widgets.

The latter text is tagless. The H1 is terminated on the first line leaving the second line tagless. Will the Google Spiders ignore or downplay it?

[ronin]

Please don't start using tags on the basis of what search engine robots think of them. Search engines are supposed to adapt to find the best content on the web, content on the web is not supposed to adapt to go chasing after the search engines.

Your example is fine:

<h1> Blue Widgets</h1> 
Find out about widgets here. We offer all types of widgets.

Other examples might be:

<h1> Blue Widgets</h1> 
<p>Find out about widgets here. We offer all types of widgets.</p>

or even

<h1> Blue Widgets</h1> 
<ul>
<li>Find out about widgets here. 
<li>We offer all types of widgets.
</ul>

I rather doubt that Google will think any one of these three variants more significant than the others... but please: HTML was around quite a while before Google and will still be around long after Google has become a pay per link casino portal (where you can also check weather conditions at US airports).

Don't let Google tell you how to write your markup.

[kazonik]

nice post ronin!

FYI: no, its not ignored.

[TheRealTerry]

To answer your question without the moral browbeating:

Google will index it fine, paragraph tag or otherwise. In the past H1 tags certainly were looked at differently and given a sort of higher weight. Usually if they matched what was in your title tag you stood a pretty good chance of gaining a nice ranking for the included keywords, all things being equal. The rules may be changing on that now, however.

As to whether you should use your HTML tags in a manner that may please Google into giving you favor, by all means do it. This is simply a part of good SEO, as long as the users experience is not lessened (which is good design). Comments otherwise are simply some odd form of imposing ones own technical morality upon you, a sort of Technotheocratic evangalism. Strange indeed.

Come on guys. When someone asks a question, just answer them, don't give them a lecture on the "purity of code".

[g1smd]

How do you appply any style to that tag-less code?

There is no tag to have any CSS attached to, or are you relying on inheritance from the body?

I would try to make pages using the standard block-level elements of headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and forms. I'm sure that Google can spider those more easily as that is what it is probably expecting to see.

[SlowMove]

I try to keep it to a minimum as long as it validates.

[Prophet]

Just write your site. If you're concerned as to what works, write your pages slightly different and monitor what happens yourself. People on here have their theories but what works for them might not work for you. Try it out and learn! :)

Prophet.

[TheRealTerry]

If you link the whole document to an external CSS file then you can define in that what H1, H2, P, etc... should look like there. Then, you just use H1, H2 and P appropriately for headers, sub headers and copy but without having to be forced to use the horribly grotesque sizing and line spacing that the default HTML renders H tags as. It makes keeping your code visibly manageable a breeze and you can apply the same styles to other pages (or sites) by just linking the CSS file.

[g1smd]

Continuing my comment about containing content in one of the 5 standard block-level elements, when you move on to XHTML note that valid code requires that all content is packaged inside a block-level container of some sort.