7 replies to this topic

[Dex]

I think I read somewhere, that it's more spider friendly to have   in empty cells in tables - is that right please?

[chrishirst]

Well I must say that's a new one.

[qwerty]

What Chris, in his subtle way, means is that a search engine really doesn't care whether it sees a space or nothing at all. It's still nothing.

However, if you leave empty table cells empty (assuming you're using the table for layout purposes), rather than placing a non-breaking space in them, you may find that some browsers treat those cells in one way, and some browsers treat them differently. So be sure to test your layout across as many browsers you can get your hands on. Either that, or start using CSS for layout instead of tables

[jeffroyit]

hmm, css instead of tables

about empy cells: yes, it is better to use nbsp for rendering purposes. spiders still don't care about it

[Dex]

Many thanks Qwerty and Chris, I didn't really explain that properly before ;-(

I thought I read somewhere, that if, for example, you had:

<table>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<th> </th>
<td>sample text - sample text - sample text</td>
<th></th>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>

Because the 1st cells are empty, the spider gets stuck, and can't get to the sample text, but in the following table, because the 1st cells are empty of any 'real text', *but*, not actually 'empty' the spider carries on going through the cells:

<table>
<tr>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<th>&nbsp;</th>
<td>sample text - sample text - sample text</td>
<th>&nbsp;</th>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>

Is that about right ?

[chrishirst]

no

[Raphael]

Spiders don't get "stuck" inside HTML. They may get caught in recursive link loops, but they don't get stuck inside HTML any more than any browser would get "stuck" inside HTML - And the spiders have an advantage over the browsers. They don't have to render the pages, so they don't even care whether your HTML is well formed or compliant or not. They just read the code, and store anything that's not an HTML tag.

[Dex]

Many thanks for the info - I obviously got the wrong details from somewhere.