Recently we converted a site for a client from tables to CSS/XHTML. The code reduction was huge and the page became very tidy. However, when they launched the site they lost over 300 positions in yahoo and disappeared off MSN. They immediately started asking questions on webmasterworld.com and a guy, apparently from MSN, answered with this in private: Basically it seems the table based counterpart of the site did much better on search engines than the well-crafted, completely valid, CSS/XHTML, one. It baffles me that this could be the case, surely MSN & yahoo shouldn't take note of the amount of code there, just that there is less of it. Anybody else had problems? This seems outrageous!
Thats to bad about CSS/XHTML and MSN & Yahoo, I'm still sticking with the tables and using CSS within them.
Oh wow - that's totally amazing. Hopefully the search engines will refine whatever caused that problem a bit.
I don't know how much credibility I'd give to this "supposed" MSN guy. It seems a little weird that when most of the SE's are very secretive... that someone would voluteer that they are from the SE. It may be true, but... might not be. Also, there seemed to have been quite a bit of a shift in MSN rankings in the month of August... they made an announcement that they were upgrading their search shortly before in July. This might have something to do with it too...