Is this practice harmful?

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Deleted member 1184445

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Back in the days it was pretty standard to use <div> everywhere, so instead of <header> we'd just throw <div class="header">. I'm concerned about the search engines ability to properly understand the content of a <div> (as it's non-semantic) when I use it instead of <p> for paragraphs. Any insights how these things are going as of 2020? Thanks in advance.
 
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That souds like lazy practice.

I suggest you have a look at Bootstrap or Material code to see how they are formatted.

Also, you can check some top ranking websites for any particular keyword and inspect their web pages.

This is the best way to go. Follow the generally-accepted frameworks and methods.
 
Chris.Roark said:
That souds like lazy practice.

I suggest you have a look at Bootstrap or Material code to see how they are formatted.

Also, you can check some top ranking websites for any particular keyword and inspect their web pages.

This is the best way to go. Follow the generally-accepted frameworks and methods.
Click to expand...
I'm sure that's not the best practice nowadays. I'm asking that because I have an old project with 100+ pages that I never published and they are all using divs everywhere. I figure it would take some hard work and time to edit them all, which I wouldn't if there was no good reason to.
 
Clean them up, it will benefit you in the long run. Lots of custom html/divs make maintenance a pain, especially if you want to redesign or update the templates. Not sure that it's going tot hurt your site though.
 
It's worth adding proper semantic elements - header, section, article, footer as it does help Google understand the hierarchy.

Also ensure you use H1, H2, p tags etc as these give a clue to structure - however, a study was done by Moz (I think) that found "multiple H1 tags will not receive a penalty" so you would not need to go back and fix any issues like that.
 
TPIN said:
It's worth adding proper semantic elements - header, section, article, footer as it does help Google understand the hierarchy.

Also ensure you use H1, H2, p tags etc as these give a clue to structure - however, a study was done by Moz (I think) that found "multiple H1 tags will not receive a penalty" so you would not need to go back and fix any issues like that.
Click to expand...
This is good advice. Proper semantic markup is what G. likes these days.
There are some useful markup guidelines here >>> https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html
 
It's good to use proper semantic markup for the page... But do all websites who rank, use it? Nopes. Do google use it for their own sites? I guess not..

So, it is not compulsory.. but a good practice.

Oh an using div instead of p, it will create issues when you have lots of pages; and lots of css rules. It is much easier to manage when you have proper markup. You will end up writing much lesser css for the app.
 
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