Does Google read links within tables?

[renegadetmj]

Hi Warriors,
I have a site that is focussed on a specific niche. From the home page I link to about 20 pages, each of which focuses on a specific brand of the niche product.
Originally I had link to each brand page as a simple text link however last week I created a table that has an image link and corresponding text link to a particular brand in each cell. I made the table colour and line colour transparent so you can’t see the table and from my perspective it looks attractive and much more tidy than my previous home page.

The thing is, I’ve noticed that my traffic to my brand pages has halved in the past week. I’m wondering if the brand pages are no longer receiving juice from the home page and have suffered in the rankings.

Does Google notice links in tables?

(I suspect that an alternative to a table would be to use CSS however I haven’t yet learned how to do this.)

[Rich Struck]

Google does follow links in tables, however, it has been my experience that it follows & reads stuff that is outside of tables first and then it kind of goes back for the tables later. ymmv

[JerrickYeoh]

If your text able to highlight and text form that it can be crawl by Google.
If your text in the table is in image form then Google unable to crawl it and you need to set the alt of the table to notified google what your table is all about.