Pros And Cons Of Tables Vs. Css, Can lots of table tags affect ranking? Options

[OysterWings]

I have several sites on which I make fairly extensive use of tables to acheive multiple columns of text and other formatting tasks. In the past I have used CSS mainly for simple stuff like fonts, colors and the like, but I am now going back and trying to get the same formatting effects using CSS instead of tables, thus producing less ponderous code.

Is this worth the effort? Do search engines just ignore tags like <table>, <tr> and <td> or can burying keyword text within multiple nested tables potentially cause a lower page ranking?

Thanks.

[MCP]

IMO not worth the effort unless your original code is terrible. If the site is done, work on the content to get better rankings.

CSS is usually cleaner, not a bad idea to think about it when building new sites, but for now I still use tables for most of my sites as do a lot of professional designers. Sometimes complex graphcial sites are better suited for table layouts than CSS ones IMO.

[rohgan03]

burying keyword text within multiple nested tables can "potentially" lead to less importance to those keywords. Atleast the most important keywords should occur higher up in the page and not be buried inside tags. However pushing keywords up should not be dont at cost of usability to user.

If you plan to add many pages and grow the site; its nice idea to use CSS. I did the same with mine. The site was made without CSS but as I tried to add articles etc it started leading to lack of uniformity across site. So I spent some time n effort in using CSS across site before adding additional content. As you add content maintaining uniformity across pages is important.

[Googlewhacked]

As with most anything else, this depends on how they are being used. If you are using a single table to determine the basic layout (2 or 3 columns, maybe a header and / or footer) and CSS for everything else (formatting, minor positioning, etc), then I would not worry about this.

However, I have also seen sites built with tables within tables within tables within tables within tables. This kind of thing might become a bit of a nuisance for visitors (since IE (& possibly NS) has to download all of the content within a table & parse it twice before displaying any of it) & spiders (since there can be a bit more markup for the poor little critters to crawl through), so if this is the case your efforts may be worthwhile.

While there are folks who would argue the virtues of going completely table-free with your design, I personally don't see a problem with tables, as long as they are used intelligently.

Hope this helps!

- Phil

[Rob]

Hi OysterWings,

You may also find this ongoing post useful:

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.ph...=5214&hl=tables

Good Luck!

Rob

[Ron Carnell]

Tableless CSS design gets big points for producing cleaner code and boosting the ego of the designer.

Sites designed with tables get points for actually working. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

The best of both worlds, I think, can be accomplished by using tables for containers, avoiding nesting of tables, and using CSS-p as a tool instead of a religion.

[seafoam]

However, I have also seen sites built with tables within tables within tables within tables within tables. This kind of thing might become a bit of a nuisance for visitors (since IE (& possibly NS) has to download all of the content within a table & parse it twice before displaying any of it) & spiders (since there can be a bit more markup for the poor little critters to crawl through), so if this is the case your efforts may be worthwhile.

My impression is that NS, or at least 4.76, will display nested tables faster than IE provided that every single image is dimensioned in the HTML code. If not it waits for the offending images to download. IE gets around this by adjusting tables on the fly as the actual images load.

I use extensive table nesting and am reasonably pleased with my SE rankings, albeit for not terribly competitive keywords. The only advantage I can see of CSS2 is that it allows you to put the most important body copy at the very start of the html file, ahead of any header blocks and top-of-page navigation. So you will gain a little bit for any part of the algorithm that puts more weight on text that appears near the start of the file. Unless your table structure pushes this element right down the file, I doubt that you will see much improvement in ranking, and unless you are chasing highly competitive keywords it may not be worth the hassle.

I only recently started using CSS1 and haven't yet switched to CSS2. I have made the decision that I can't afford to invest the time in the learning curve to master it and find out about all the browser compatability issues. And as a NS4.76 user, believe me, there are issues!

[OysterWings]

Well, I spent the weekend studying some examples from csszengarden.com and changing the home page of of my web site from being completely dependent on tables to one that is identical in appearance, but without a single table or font tag. Don't know if it was worth the effort, but I thought it would be a good learning exercise and SEO experiment.

I still have to update the remainder of the site, but that should be much easier now that I have the .css file. The initial results are a reduction in file size from 17.6 kb to 11.6 kb, code that is much easier for a human (and maybe search engine spider) to read and it looks good in a Lynx viewer. Still way to early to tell about any SEO results and with all the variables involved, that may not be measurable anyway.

For those not familiar with csszengarden.com and interested in CSS, you may want to check it out. It allows multiple authors to each render a version of the web site by changing ONLY the style sheet. The HTML is not changed at all. It is pretty amazing the diverse looks that are achieved.

[domokun]

i designed my latest site www.credityeti.co.uk using mainly css.
apparently the supper flexible layout goes a bit skewy at 800x600 on winXP.
in order to fix this im going to have to change the display of 30+ pages by changing a single value in the style sheet.
(IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/cheers.gif)