Tables and Their SEO Factor

[RooosteR]

Can someone tell me if applying tables into my web design will hurt my SEO rankings? I have been receiving mixed feedback to this question as some have said a "fully backed" (summary included) tables used in web design will help SEO ranking as others have told me that this old way of web design will never be recognized. Any and all help would be appreciated. Thanks

[socialbookmark]

As i know,using tables has no problem with SEO. I only heard using iframes is not good for seo and avoiding them is better but i think using tables is fine. Almost all websites have tables on them.

[dadamson]

Tables have been proven to be bad for SEO, well.. not as good as a nicely designed CSS websites with seperate CSS style sheet.

I guess this just allows the bots to crawl the site easier.

[dadamson]

Thanks socialbookmark. - iFrames = very bad.

Search engines won't see their content is they are regarded as a seperate webpage.

[RooosteR]

Thanks for the prompt feedback. Do you guys happen to have any sources that would point me in the right direction?

[yukon]

That's nonsense that tables will have any impact on a pages SEO.

I have a site that has tables on almost every single page (entire Nav.).

I've never had a problem in the SERPs, running tables.

[yukon]

Find any site that is running tables & check the Google Cache (text-only version).

I bet you will find all the content intact.

Wikipedia has tables on every single page, doesn't look like they have a problem with SEO.

[Mark Brian]

Tables are designed to display tabular data.
Divs are designed to separate elements in a page.

Both has absolutely no effect on SEO.

[RooosteR]

Thank you guys for all of the clarification. You just saved me a good amount of time.

[dadamson]

Thanks for your insight guys. I've learned something here and I'll have to do more testing on the subject. Cheers!

[john smith1]

According to me Tables wont affect seo factor

[jazbo]

Proven?

Could you direct me to this amazing research please.

Originally Posted by dadamson

Tables have been proven to be bad for SEO, well.. not as good as a nicely designed CSS websites with seperate CSS style sheet.

I guess this just allows the bots to crawl the site easier.

[dadamson]

Originally Posted by jazbo

Proven?

Could you direct me to this amazing research please.

@jazbo, If you read my next post you would see that I have retracted my statement and admit I need to do more testing on the subject..

As for directing you to the "amazing research", it has been debated in many forums before. The fact is, nobody knows exactly how the search engines rank pages but the bots don't always read the entire page in one go. If there is too much text on a page the bots simply won't stay on the page to read all the text.

No one know how the search engines handle tables but my thoughts have always been that tables bloat the code and if you have a left nav bar it will appear first in your code before the meat of the content.

Designing in CSS allows the meat of the content to display higher up the top and can be moved above your navigation bars. In theory, this gives your content more exposure to the bots that only glance over your page.

There are so many advantages of using CSS over tables that it is just not a viable option to create sites in tables these days.

If you need to be directed to some research, the debates are constantly going on at webmasterworld - Why HTML based tables considered as bad? General Search Engine Marketing Issues forum at WebmasterWorld

[yukon]

Originally Posted by dadamson

@jazbo, If you read my next post you would see that I have retracted my statement and admit I need to do more testing on the subject..

As for directing you to the "amazing research", it has been debated in many forums before. The fact is, nobody knows exactly how the search engines rank pages but the bots don't always read the entire page in one go. If there is too much text on a page the bots simply won't stay on the page to read all the text.

No one know how the search engines handle tables but my thoughts have always been that tables bloat the code and if you have a left nav bar it will appear first in your code before the meat of the content.

Designing in CSS allows the meat of the content to display higher up the top and can be moved above your navigation bars. In theory, this gives your content more exposure to the bots that only glance over your page.

There are so many advantages of using CSS over tables that it is just not a viable option to create sites in tables these days.

If you need to be directed to some research, the debates are constantly going on at webmasterworld - Why HTML based tables considered as bad? General Search Engine Marketing Issues forum at WebmasterWorld

I don't see a reason to debate tables/seo.

If the page that the table is on displays the table content, & is included in the Google Cache (text-only version) then Google doesn't have a problem reading the on-page/table content.

In your link above (Matt Probert) said it best about checking cntent with a text-browser, which is the same as looking at the Google Cache (text-only version).