SE's and Tables?

[Vulcan315]

Can the SE's crawl and read the info contained in tables? My site is over 100 pages of info, and is almost all within tables for control of columns, justification, etc.

Thanks,
Dave

[buckworks]

Yes, SE's can read and index info contained in tables.

How they might rank such content is a different question, but at least they'll see it.

[bushey]

Search G for "table trick"

Chris

[caveman]

We have plenty of sites built with tables, and have never seen any evidence that tables have hurt them in any way.

I might even go so far as to say the tables are a good thing...though increasingly, I see comments to the contrary.

[Blelisa]

Here is a neat trick I found when I had the same question. check your site in a text browser such as Lynx. What you see on that page along with the ease of use of your site and your links is what the se's experience. Based on this information I than created a duplicate of one of my pages in CSS and found there to be a huge difference. Needless to say I no longer use tables, when possible.

[wheel]

Chris - the table trick, is that where you put the main page content before the nav links? I read that in 'speed up your website'. It's like this:

Normal layout:
tr
td Navigation bar #td
td Main Page Information #td
#tr

Put your Main Page before the nav bar, so content is higher for the search engines, but browsers show it the same:

tr
td #td
td rowspan=2 Main Page Information #td
#tr
tr
td Navigation bar #td
#tr

That book BTW, is well worth the cost. Lots of advanced relatively technical info on how to speed up page display.

[bushey]

Wheel

is that where you put the main page content before the nav links?

YES

so content is higher for the search engines, but browsers show it the same

YES

Chris