Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Today I reached $100 21 days later.
I have a few other sites I'm going to put the ads on in the coming weeks. Thanks to all the help I get from you guys on stategy I know I'm well on my way.
1 question: My ads are not totally in line with my content. How do I get google to notice more my meta tags and description and main page welcome message which clearly holds the keywords relevent to the content of the website.
Congrats on the $100!
[google.com ]
The spider after going down so many table layers in search of content will back out and leave if it doesn't find any text it can use.
A tableless layout is much cleaner for the spider to more easily find the header tags that we all should be using.
You can say what you want about about CSS and using it or not but I recently finished a site for a client and two weeks later it is at least at number 5 for its keywords in all engines I look for it in.
Tableless layouts work IMHO. If you go to top notch school like Full Sail, this is what they are teaching their students.
My main sites have been #1 on Google, Yahoo! and MSN for years - and I use tables.
This algorithm change has only occured in the last year and a half. Its active both in google and yahoo. Site Pro News talks about it quite often.
Let someone design two sites with the same topic. One in tables and one in complete CSS and the div layout will win in the search engines everytime and twice on Sunday.
There are plenty of sites below mine already that use CSS. With all due respect, I don't see any evidence whatsoever that search engines rank CSS sites over sites that use tables. I believe that they rank sites based on link popularity, bookmarks and content (among other things).
The search engines don't back out of tables a certain number of levels deep because they simply don't bother to track them recursively. In fact, for the majority of the processing they simply ignore anything between < and >.
Trying to parse the layout HTML is viewed as being a waste of an incredible amount of computing resources.
unfortunately, BigDave, Play_Bach and wariental are correct.
the content is what ranks, obviously with many other factors, but using tables or not will not change your rank. That is just incorrect.
as to your actual question
>> My ads are not totally in line with my content
there are many threads around about targetting that should help.
The spider after going down so many table layers in search of content will back out and leave if it doesn't find any text it can use.
Yeah, it's a myth. I'm pretty sure I heard Matt Cutts dismiss that as a myth at PubCon last week.
I've seen to many sites go through code revisions and then weeks later shoot up charts with the engines to believe that clean CSS code makes no difference.
Putting links in your head to css style sheet and java scripts and getting rid of tables is in MHO the way to go to get your site seen by your audience. A quick search on google reveals that this topic is one of much discussion.
New school vs. old school.
the spiders backing out theory is incorrect, just not true
does clean code work better for seo than crappy cluttered code? absolutely
does pure css rank better than tables
no, no proof, no truth, no kidding
I agree absolutely, use clean code and pull js and css off page, but this can be done with tables too.
New school vs. old school
Table-less design is old school. Nobody around here has proposed that as an SEO advantage in in two or three years.
Clean code is cool, as jatar_k says, but it's not giving you an advantage. That the spiders are going to back out is an old school myth.
Is it raining?
This is like arguing whether it's raining outside or not. My advice is to step outside and if you get wet, it's raining.
So check the SERPS for the most competitive serps and you'll see it doesn't make a lick of difference. A few lines of code are completely inconsequential against the onslaught of a table site with tons of backlinks. It's like fighting a tank with a nickleplated gun. Yeah, it's shiny and neat, but it doesn't stand a chance.
It's a myth. Matt Cutts commented on that in the Search Engine Smackdown Session at PubCon. Do you even know who Matt Cutts is?
SEO rule #1: Fix all your internal links.
SEO rule #2: have content worth linking to.
SEO rule #3: Get links from quality sites with good anchor text.
SEO rule #4: Make sure that your code is good enough not to break the spiders.
...
SEO rule #137: Use CSS and JS files to move cruft out of your files.
SEO rule #138: Ignore those that claim that CSS is the only way to do things, and use tables where they are more efficient.
What google cares about is getting users to the *information* they are looking for. Often the best information comes from people that are not web professionals. Layout factors tell little about the quality of the information. All that a tableless layout tells you is that the person knows web design, it does not tell you how well they know the subject of the page.
Fine - don't. Doesn't change the facts, however.
There are many sites that have incorporated some CSS into their predominantly table-based layouts as way to improve appearance and shorten update time. Full redesigns on the other hand aren't necessarily warranted for many site owners and the idea that if they did their page rank would somehow magically shoot upwards is to put it kindly, BS.
I'll keep designing sites my way and you keep doing whatever your doing. Hows that? :)
Remember, you must think like the end user who knows nothing about SEO.
#1 - Your web pages top value is the content. read article I wrote a few years ago "Writing Your Body Content".
#2 - End users don't care how they get the content they are looking for. Therefore, the more links you have to your content page the easier it is for the end user to find your content page, thus making your page more popular and ranking you higher.
You can have the worst code on the net, CSS or tables and still outrank sites that spend thousands on code and design.
It's simple: good content and alot of ways to find the good content.
