Tables

Are tables search engine friendly?

[BuckerBucker]

Are the words inside tables able to be recognized by the search engines? How about text boxes? How about frames? My current website is framed heavily, and I have just realized that Google neglects my keywords completely as a result. Since I want to do it right this time, will the tables show off my content?

[lorax]

Tables - yes,
Text boxes - (do you mean form elements type="text" or textarea?),
Frame - yes,
Framed page - no

It is strongly rumored that Google largely ignores meta keywords.

[BuckerBucker]

Thanks for your quick response lorax! The text box I'm referring to is one that is created when using "Front Page". When I look at the coding, it appears to just create a table that can be written in, which moves the contents as a whole group when it is moved. Thanks once again for your help.

[thehittmann]

yep google is able to read all of that text in the tables and in the frames.
if the framed pages have no links to them though they will fall out of the google index all the time. It's best to create every page like its own entery page to your website. and yeah google doesnt consider anyones keywords unless they are relevant to the sites title and content but google is not a meta SE.

[PSilver]

Search engine spiders generally don't like framed sites and sometimes won't spider them at all. Generally what happens though is because there's only one link to a particular page, that from the navigation frame to load the main content frame, search engines just think the content page isn't very important.

Two ways to help make sure your framed pages are found are:

1. In the HTML of your frameset page you can have <noframes></noframes> underneath the </frames> tag. Inside the <noframes> copy the links out of your navigation page (frame) and in to this. That gives the spiders links to follow to your content pages.

2. At the bottom of all the content pages, put text links to the other content pages. Again, this gives links for the spiders to follow.

If you have any server-side language available (like PHP, ASP or ColdFusion) you can use that to include your navigation in to every page. You only need to learn a tiny bit of code to do this and it keeps the spiders much happier, and means people can bookmark the particular page they're interested in easily.