Tables, Styles, and Search Engines, Oh My!

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Tables, Styles, and Search Engines, Oh My!

TheSeoGuy

8:43 pm on Feb 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

Aside from the argument that html tables should only be used to hold tabular data and not for design purposes, does anyone know if using them for design purposes affects search engines and how they crawl web pages?

For example, I tend to use a lot of nested tables along with style sheets to get my sites to look like I want them to. I have seen a number of designers use only styles sheets and NO TABLES to achieve their results. Does anyone know if search engine spiders prefer one over the other?

Tables with content vs. Styles (No Tables) with Content?

Thanks in advanced.

keywordguru

9:19 pm on Feb 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

I successfully use a combination of just about everything including css stylesheets, in combination with some serious table structures sometimes. I find that it has not made any difference. In between some complete redesigns, the bot has taken a good month or two to completely respider the new style sites, but they've always seemed to rank even higher due to seo efforts.

So I would say, try to keep it as clean as you can. It will make it easier for the bot. I am sure some will say otherwise, this is just my finding. As always good ethics and validated pages are the safest bet.

TheSeoGuy

10:05 pm on Feb 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the response keywordguru,

I didn't think it made much of a difference, but I just wanted to see if anyone else had experienced otherwise.

le_gber

7:58 pm on Feb 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

I might be running on info a couple of years old but I beleive the CSS based site can/will rank better for the following reasons:

you can put you h1 tags and important text right after the opening <body> tag and the bot won't have to go through 5 sets of <table><tr><td> before hitting them

with CSS based sites you can structure your page to such an extend that it will appear lean and mean to SE bots - you can't really do that with tables as you're dependant to cells etc...

the ratio text / code is higher with CSS sites so it will be given more importance by SE

the file size should be A LOT smaller and there was a rumor saying the smaller the better :)

Anyone care to add anything or am I the only one thinking that way?

Leo

TheSeoGuy

9:05 pm on Feb 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

le_gber,

Those are all very interesting points.

I have never even thought of the code to content ratio being a factor!

Thanks for posting!