Are nested tables or divs better for seo?

[Jamie_uk]

I'm designing a new site, does anyone know if fixed sites built with divs or liquid built with nested tables and clear/spacer gif's are better for search engine optimisation?

[tedster]

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule. My best results have been coming with one main table to hold the basic structure in place and then all divs internally -- so no nested tables, but not all css either.

Spacer gifs are really an antique, in my opinion. CSS rules give a much cleaner page, and even more options for displaying a page with elegant layout and typesetting. But for SEO, the advantages are even clearer.

With tables, the semantic relationship of various parts of the page can be distorted. That is, the content in cell A might relate strongly to the content in cell F, but there's no way for an algorithm to see that from the source code. With divs, you can show the proximity of related text much more clearly. You can also position less important text toward the bottom of the html document, no matter where it renders on the page.

Also with tables, the file size tends to be higher, just to display the same content. So for all these reasons and more, I see better results using mostly CSS - and that is a common report from people who change layouts away from nested tables.

But analyzing the pages that rank on any SERP, you will see that many table based pages do extremely well. As I said, no hard and fast rule. And Google has definitely changed in their ability to make sense of the content in nested tables -- it used to be more of a problem than it is now.

[Jamie_uk]

Thanks for your response, it's very useful.