CMS making body copy mark up faux pais

[Nightwing]

Good morning from 13 degrees C wet an windy wetherby UK

Ive noticed some CMS platforms do not mark up body copy correctly. In other words instead of marking up body copy within p tags its marking body content in the following ways:

and

Whilst my gutt feeling this is not good i wonder just how serious a problem it will cause for the Google bots ie will they have problems indexing the content as  its best to always wrap contnet in opening and closing p tags.

So my question is please, am i worrying uneccesarily or is there a genuine penalty to pay SEO wise when body content is not mark up correctly.

A live example of markup wriddled with break tags is here: http://www.langleys.com/

Thanks in advance

[BryanCasson]

I do not believe Google will have any problem whatsoever crawling that page. They will certainly not assign any penalty to the page with regards to the tags used. They are more likely to frown on the fact they are using a "keywords" metatag. Come on people, lets unite to get rid of the keywords tag once and for all.

If it makes you feel any better, I have tons of very well ranked sites with similar CMS systems in place. No problems at all.

[Highland]

Bots tend to see the world as text-only (i.e. more like how Lynx renders the web) . This means the formatting tags mostly get stripped out or ignored. As much as everyone promotes their design coding schemes (tables vs divs vs paragraphs) I've never seen a benefit shown for any particular one. Remember, CMS systems make up a good portion of the web.

The only potential downside to this would be on long pages. Bots tend to index the first 100k and ignore the rest. I don't know for sure if that includes HTML or not but I would always err on the side of cleaner HTML.