I absolutely care about how google "reacts" to my directories as lets face it, they are worthless without good google index penetration - I understand fully the implications of having unique content etc, but in reality my main interest in all of these directories is maximum number of indexed pages to provide me with the most amount of pages to build links to my other sites using. I have no doubt that this attitude will be against the grain of most professional directory owners views, but I am not a professional directory owner, I am merely using them to build SERP credibility for my other sites that provide me with my bread and butter!
The answer to this question if a template conforms to the W3C validation and CSS validation you could run into problems with getting index. There are quite a few templates out there that don't conform but I'd like to think that they are in the minority. More concern should be given to how the sitemap and category structures are formulated as these are far more likely to cause you to get poor index ratings with Google and the other search engines.
however not within the context of my question. all of my directories in this experiment use the same category structure so this isnt a variable.
I based my answer on not assuming Google's methods but on past experience with templates MOG; I threw in the category structure as an addition to compliment the answer more than to go out of context of the original question.
Yes the design of your template has a lot to do with how easily a bot can navigate your site. A good coder will know this.
Fuck, it just unbelievable. Never mind you re-open 3 years old thread which is idiocy by itself because you could start new one, you also have no freaking idea what you are talking about, which is even worth. So you know and never confused already confused wannaby SEO morons, crawler see page as text file which means it doesn't matter what kind of template you're using. I hope you know what text file means. fastreplies