Do FONT tags inside hyperlinks damage SERP rank?

Structure of hyperlink important?

[rehabguy]

Anybody seen a study on this:

<a href="widget.htm><font size=1><b>Link</b></font></a>

vs.

<a href="widget.htm>Link</a>

If link text matters to Google, does having font tags between your "a" tag and the text mess up the crawl?

[Reflect]

I've always played it safe and use external CSS to define my link states, header, etc..

Take care,

Brian

[oaktown]

Just to be neat and tidy, I would be loath to put anything at all inside the link tags, except the link itself.

[Noisehag]

If it's only one link, I'd do it like this:

<a href="widget.htm" style="font-size:10px;font-weight:bold;">Link</a>

More than that, I'd do exactly as Reflect suggests above.