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Can using tables hurt my Search Engine Results (SERPs)?

I can't seem to get a straight answer when it comes to how a site is coded/built and the affects that this has on SEO. After having taken a few web courses (design to SEO related courses) it seems to me that the "best practice" with regard to building a site that is search engine "friendly" is with CSS, utilizing as few tables as possible. I've been told by numerous instructors that tables can adversely affect SEO rankings and they don't recommend constructing with tables (they consider this an outdated approach).

However, I work with a couple of web developers that swear this isn't true and refuse to move away from building sites with tables. Can you solve this mystery for me once and for all? And, if CSS is the way to go, should I go to the expense of having sites developed with tables converted to CSS in order to improve SEO??

Dave's Answer:

Note: This was a "priority question": by paying a small fee, Barb received an answer directly from me within 36 hours. Well worth it if it's a question where you need to know the answer immediately, not weeks, or possibly even months down the road. Even better, it helps support our work here at Ask Dave Taylor too.

Thanks, Barb. You ask a great question!

I have never heard that tables can adversely affect your SEO placement (also known as your "SERPs"), and on the face of it, that doesn't make sense anyway. As long as it's legal HTML and properly formed, I can't imagine it's a problem. The definitive word for this sort of thing is always Google, and a quick check at their Webmaster Guidelines reveals nothing about tables being good or bad.

SEO Notepad says: "Today, the discussion has become more of an argument over whether using CSS is superior to using tables, and that is a debate that is largely a matter of taste and style."

One author at Webmaster World had a good point too: "One advantage to table free design can be semantic. When you use tables for layout, groups of text on the page that are actually related visually and in meaning can end up widely separated in the html."

What I will say, however, is that a pure-CSS site is problematic, because if you think about it, a page that's encoded like:

<div class="super-important-title">My Important Key Words</div>

<div class="regular-text">This is stuff that's not anywhere near as important</div>

How can the search engine figure out what are the most important words on the page if it doesn't parse the CSS structure? Compare that to:

<h1 class="super-important-title">My Important Key Words</h1>

<p class="regular-text">This is stuff that's not anywhere near as important</p>

Now you've given Google a lot more information to work with: The "h1" is a headline that is critically important to identifying the content of the page, while the text in the "p" block is just regular text.

Does that make sense? As a general rule, the search engines don't parse and analyze CSS or Javascript, so designers who get too fancy with their layout code end up hurting you with search engine results, not helping, even if the site's gorgeous.

Ultimately, though, the real keys to success are to produce great content with frequency that's never shown up elsewhere online, to have good page titles that are specific to the content of that page, and to gain inbound links from related sites.

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Categorized: HTML and CSS , Search Engine Optimization (Article 9044)
Tagged: css, google, search engine optimization, seo, serps, tables
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Comments

Hi Dave, I think that Jill Whalen would disagree with you about H1 tags. In a recent article at http://searchengineland.com/most-of-seo-is-just-a-boondoggle-22297 she said:

"And don’t get me started on H1 tags. Old school SEOs swear by them, and often suggest if you don’t have keywords in them, your page is doomed. Yet, take them off a page and you’ll be hard pressed to see rankings or traffic changes from Google."

So who's correct?

Posted by: JohnH at August 21, 2009 10:22 AM

Sorry, but logic dictates that a search engine spider that's reading through 400 words of actual content on a page needs to have some way of ascertaining which words are more important than others through a mechanism more accurate than keyword density. Ergo, it analyzes the markup that's applied to the different words and phrases on the page.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at August 21, 2009 10:41 AM

I agree,

In fact, if the html pages are a front end for a database driven set of pages those pages will return table based anyway.

Jack

Posted by: Jack at August 21, 2009 11:24 AM

Sorry Dave, but I think there are some issues that have to be separated. Without tables does not mean without structural tags like headings (h1 to h6, paragraphs (p) and lists (li). Or formatting (b, em, etc.) tags for that matter. Without tables just means don’t use the tag.

And in my humble opinion it has some SEO advantages not to use tables in Webdesign.

Maurice

Posted by: Maurice at August 21, 2009 5:35 PM

I consider tables highly outdated. I think that tables should be used for what they were originally intended, tabular data. There are a lot of CSS snobs around who will insist that everything must be CSS, to the extent that they will make a complex set of classes to mimic a table. In my mind this is crazy.

CSS is the way to go for layout as it tips the balance between content and structure back towards content, which we know google likes. But if you want to include a table of numerical data, by all means put a table in, it's what they are there for afterall.

Posted by: Charles at August 24, 2009 12:49 PM

Charles nailed it. Good comment. Thats exactly what tables are supposed to be used for - data.

Posted by: Nicholas Duncan at September 9, 2009 4:57 AM

Oh yeah, and one last thing: Any web designer that builds a complete website in tables, doesn't know how to use CSS properly.

Posted by: Nicholas Duncan at September 9, 2009 5:20 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!