CTO argues that optimizing a SEO-driven blog with Webflow is more complex than doing it elsewhere

Publishing help SEO
1

This is what he wrote to me:

…two examples of increasing complexity: The attached image is a screenshot of the [page url] code, and there is space at the end of a paragraph. Webflow has generated code that adds a paragraph with a special .html value inside that represents a blank space.
Google’s best practices, on the other hand, tell you not to put empty paragraphs but to play with the margin and padding of the previous paragraph.
Can it be fixed by Webflow? Yes, just be careful that every time you want to put a blank line instead of pressing enter in the editor you select the previous paragraph and apply a class that gives it some space at the end. Or make a tool that takes the html generated by Webflow and cleans it.
Another request that the SEO specialist made us is to put all articles with more than one h2 in a menu written in code exactly like this:

<ul purpose = 'summary'>
   <li>
      <a href=''/>
   </li>
</ul>

There must be nothing else. Webflow, for any list, generates at least this code:

<ul role = 'list'>
  <li role = 'list-item'> ...
</ul>

The only way to bring the generated code to the specifications that SEO specialist gave us is to make a tool that takes the Webflow code, searches all the <ul> and removes that "role = list" that bothers Google.

Now, in the first case, it’s easily doable and I never did that, so it could be just some space into pasted text for long text pages.

The second point again I believe it’s a simple script any dev could do in seconds and then apply throughout the whole project.

So I am now thinking now, is it possible that for these two reasons Webflow can’t be good for a SEO-driven blog?

Thanks for your help!

2

In the first case, yes, you don’t need blank paragraphs. I can’t imagine that affecting SEO, it’s just whitespace… but you wouldn’t need it in your design anyway. Just style your rich text elements so paragraphs have margin at the bottom.

In the second, a script could easily fix that if you want, and Google does a good job of analyzing script-processed pages. But I’m not sure why those attributes would be considered an issue, they’re used for accessibility. Generally that’s a positive thing in Google’s book.

I haven’t researched this specifically though.