Hiding links/text from Google bot?

It can be seen by most broswer and spider but google can't

[FillDeCube]

<table>
<tr> <!-- NOTE :- pay attention to this missing td here-->
<table>
<tr>
<td>.... links and etc.. </td>
</tr>
</table>
</tr>
</table>

I accidentally found that google bot can't "see" all links and text that resides in the <td> example above.

I found this when I reliased that all my pages in <td> wasn't indexed by google but other bot does.
When I add the missing <td> into the html all the text in <td> is finally "viewable" by google bot..

Anyone experience this before? Is this a google bot bug?

I wonder if any webmaster out there using this trick to hide reciprocal links.

[korkus2000]

The code is not valid and shouldn't be used. Why would you have content in a table row but not in a table data cell? I think you will find that some browsers also will have problems with that code. You should validate your code at [validator.w3.org...] to find errors like these in your code before it goes into production.

[ciml]

> using this trick to hide reciprocal links

Lots of sites have reciprocal links. If you can swap links with relevant sites then it might help search engines to understand the subject matter of your site; if not now then probably in the future IMO.

If someone hides links by relying on the specific error-handling methods of some popular browsers, then I'd guess that they're not going to be looked on as kindly if they get a human review.

[rogerd]

It's an interesting find, but as ciml notes counting on a bot to handle malformed HTML consistently is pretty chancy. It might even depend on other page HTML tags, i.e., the same code on a page of a quite different design might yield a different result.

[jomaxx]

It seems strange to me that Google would attempt to parse TABLE, TR and TD tags, rather than just discarding them. I can't imagine they have much if any effect on the algorithm.