Is it true that tables are bad for SEO? I read somewhere that if you can do without them, it would be better for search engines.
From a coding point of view the trimmmer your pages the less a spider has to crawl, hence there's more meat and less bone... Complicated table-based layouts do have more code than simple CSS based layouts But I wouldn't go as far as saying tables are BAD though. Do you sleep with your legs outside the covers at night or do you you fear monsters under the bed will grab them?
One BIG problems with using tables though is people who don't eally think them out and nest them deeper and deeper into each other. As an SEO I can honestly say that tables have caused serious problems for some sites I have worked on. But that said, it was not the tables it was their misuse. E.G. one site I worked on had a search facility for the site that was nested 6 tables deep. The spider choked on this page, and as the search facility was ahead of the navigation element, the site never got spidered. Another aspect of using tables is that they will move the content around in the code. So the text at the top might well end up at the bottom of the code. But apart from that, there is no impact on SEo. I still use tables when esigning and have no problem with it. Sorry for all the CSS absolute positioning dudes out there
So having nested 2 or a max of 3 tables shouldn't be a problem... And yeah I was thinking about the content which is moved to the end because of tables since search engines consider the top content to be the most important and relevant
never more than 3 deep, and if you are using dynamic stuff inside them then try to get that as close to the top table as possible.
In another thread, iskandar pointed me to a helpful site. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=322110&postcount=11
I have some sites designed with software that make overly complex pages with multiple level tables. I'm happy with the ranking and search engine results on those sites. IMO it does not matter.
Absolutely false! Modern search engines are absolutely not limited by tables...this is ridiculous. As long as your html codes don't have any errors, they should rank well. Plus, spiders are blind to tables. They just see text anyway.
I think we should step back and have a look at how tables CAN affect SEO. Unless your SEO efforts are 100% link bombing, then it is essential your pages are cached fully. I don't think anyone can disagree with this statement. Tables CAN prevent a page being cached if they are nested to deeply, have errors in the code etc, and have dynamic content inside the deep nested tables. I can tell you now that I worked on a cold fusion site that had a search facility nested a few tables deep, and the spider was choking on it. we cleaned the tables up, and the spiders then cached it and the rest of the site. it is fine to say that 'I have a site nested 5 deep and I have no problems', but that is because static pages are spidered differently to dynamic ones. the spiders show more server respect to dynamic pages than they do standard html pages, simply because there is almost no effort to deliver a text of a static page. OTOH it takes processor resource to deliver a dynamic page. For whatever reason, if you nest too deep, the server response might be slow due to load anyhow, and the spider backs out, leaving the page unindexed. WHAM, your seo is up the bung. So back to the original question: Like everything in SEO the answer is not black or white I would say that at face value, tables mean nothing with regard SEO, with the proviso they are coded right, and not nested to deeply. Hopefully this has condensed what I was saying earlier and explained it better.
This is some reassurement to me. I have a site that I had thought was laid out pretty cleanly using netobjects fusion. Then the other day I looked at the source code and it had piles of html for the left side links. I had used a single table for those links, but about 40 cells...just a convenient way to do it in wysiwig world. I wondered about advice I had seen elsewhere that beginners should use site generator type software. I can see how they could drag and drop themselves into a real mess. I was thinking about eliminating my link table, but it sounds like the spiders can handle that one by all accounts. To tell the truth, it was the only way I could figure to tighten the space between the links in netobjects.
I think having too much "white space" in the HTML code is worse than having nested tables. That's why in FrontPage 2003 I always optimize my HTML to make it spider-friendly.
Yep. Learning css and some php is on the list with a pile of other things! I've been only seriously building sites for less than a year. My "day job" is seasonal and I'll have time this winter to tackle more learning. For now I'm using frontpage (just as an html editor) netobjects, drupal, postnuke, webmerge, and a dozen different php scripts and snippets. I'm slowly transitioning from "whatever gets it online" to building sites for seo and usability. So the link table is one of those compromises I make. It is so easy to get sidetracked learning this and that for me at this stage that sometimes I have to shut it all out and just crank out the pages with my current best ability. Netobjects essentially generates css, but I can't always trick it into what I want. I've heard the benefits of style sheets shouted often enough, I'll be giving it a shot on a winter project. That and learning to design a php/mysql site from scratch... hmmm...I think its about time I lost the goofy avatar.
uh...is white space when you put space in the code because your are adding snippets to see what happens and don't want to lose your place? Guilty!!!!
No white space is a printing term that basically means areas of the page in the same colur as the background that do not contain content. The print design term was use white space, and allow the advert to breathe.
Ah just read the contexty of 'white space' as it was used, and yes your right, he meant lots of empty lines and useless spaces.