Use of tables and nested tables in SEO

Will this hurt me in the ratings?

[uk_webber]

I use tables in my site design and even nested tables when I need to structure my page. Is using tables going to hurt my rating?

Will spiders be able to crawl heavy tabled pages?

thanks..

[isitreal]

Yes, but the more code that is in the way, the more junk they have to plow through to get to your content, links, etc. Nested tables are probably not going to help you much, a simple table has no more code in it than any div structured site.

Count from the top of your html: how many lines until you get to your nav bar, how many to your page content? How many lines html is on the page relative to the content?

A clean html page should have relatively little html, it doesn't matter what that html is, but multiple nested tables are extra junk that shoves your content further down, and at least according to the old google algo, the further down the page something is, the less valuable it is, that length is measured I believe in bytes.

[Krapulator]

This site [google.com] uses nested tables and really doesn't seem to have any issues getting ranked ;)

[isitreal]

And their code doesn't validate, which is pretty funny...

But WebmasterWorld is sort of cheating, they'd rank no matter what they did.

If you've ever read the original google algo description, which I doubt has changed all that much re how it handles html, google pretty much ignores html except for h tags, b tags, title and a tags. The rest is just junk, whether that junk is div ul li or table tr td is pretty irrelevant obviously, despite heated claims and wishful thinking to the contrary... the one thing I think it doesn't ignore is how much of that junk is on the page, if that junk is before the content/links etc, which at least used to suggest that it was of lesser importance.

however, the main point is to have as little of that junk on your page as you can relative to your content as a general rule, obviously a pro seo can work around anything, but that's probably a fairly safe way to go in general, easier to maintain too...

[mofo]

Make a clear structured site, even if you use tables. If you have too much content put it in 2 pages.

Use alt, title,h, and b.

You shouldn't have any problems.

[ncw164x]

Don't go over the top with a nested table inside a nested table which is inside a nested table and so on, you need to design your site a different way if you need to do this.

It does not make any difference what so ever if you use tables or all css for your site layout, its whats on the pages and the head content what matters. A good title is important along with description using the text what you have on your page, make use of alt text for your graphics and H1 and H2 tags for your heading.

Use the keyword tag but google makes no use of it at this moment in time, other search engines do so its always good practice to use it

bottom line is keep it simple and the search engine spiders don't have any problems

ncw164x

[tedster]

There's a lot of old advice on the web about nesting tables. In the nineties, it appeared that algorithms assumed the deeper the nesting, the less important the content. That's changed and I see no evidence of such an assumption today.

However, if you use nested tables be doubly sure to validate your code, and I mean after any editing whatsover. Missing or mangled <table>, <tr> and <td> tags can confuse the spider into skipping sections of your page altogether.

However, you will see that nested tables also add a lot of mark-up to the page. As a general rule, very clean pages with a high ratio of content to total html get a bit of a leg up.