tedster - 1:19 am on Jan 19, 2012 (gmt 0)

I have always have this suspicion, that text on site is just for google to what its about, but almost zero value for rankings.

The way I see it, on-page text today is for the "relevance" part of the total algorithm. The whole algorithm is, in broad strokes, "relevance + connectedness + quality". After you've clearly stated the relevance of the page, then the rest of your ranking power comes from elsewhere.

I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed <h1> elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore.

And moving from a table layout to a CSS-P layout today might get you nowhere, too. It all depends how deeply complicated the table layout was, I think.