Tables and engines.....

[creative craig]

Does anyone know how a spider will respond if it finds a nested table?

How many nested tables deep can one go, with out fear that the spider will give up and head off in the other direction?

Craig :)

[Nick_W]

It won't really matter. The spiders pick out the text from between tags. They follow the flow of text in the document not the visual flow of a page as seen by you or I.

Of course there are other factors such as code - content ratio that affect spiders but that's another thread ;)

Nick

[piskie]

Good point Nick, Code to Content ratio is often neglected.
Complex table structures eat HTML code.
That's why CSS can boost positions.

[creative craig]

Thanks you just settled an argument!

[ukgimp]

I once used Dreamweaver to make layers into tables, on screen it looked fine but the code was obscene. For weeks google was only picking up the main page and not going any deeper. I rehashed the page and the next day all the inner pages were crawled.

That was simply down to a convoluted table structure.

Cheers