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Someone should try a case study to determine whether or not tables interfere with SE ranking or not. Should be easy enough…I may take a crack at it myself, even though my CSS skills need some work. My opinion is that tables is pretty low on the list of things to worry about as far as SEO goes, but it’s not based on any actual split testing.
Randy wrote:Someone should try a case study to determine whether or not tables interfere with SE ranking or not. Should be easy enough…I may take a crack at it myself, even though my CSS skills need some work. My opinion is that tables is pretty low on the list of things to worry about as far as SEO goes, but it’s not based on any actual split testing.Yeah i agree. They add more to the pageload overhead than DIVs and are arguably harder to navigate by robots. However the main advantage to DIVs is that you can use “position:absolute” and put important text near the top of the source code even if appears down your physical file. Good for loading relevancy
Simmo! wrote:However the main advantage to DIVs is that you can use “position:absolute” and put important text near the top of the source code even if appears down your physical file. Good for loading relevancyExactly right. The first thing the spider sees with a DIV-based page could be:Free Online Casinos
This is my page about free online casinos. If you looking for free online casinos, look no further…. etc….
And then at the end of the “content,” you use absolute DIVs to position the navigation, the top header image (if you have one), and anything else that isn’t supposed to be the main focus of the page.
With a table-based layout, the spider will “see” the page exactly as it appears on the screen. So, first it will see the top image/header, then it will see your navigation (assuming it is along the top or on the left side of the page inside a
, then it will see your content… Lastly, it will see the right-hand column (if you have one), and then the footer. DIVs can be take a while to learn and master, but it’s definitely worth the effort. Changing the appearance of an entire site by tweaking something in the CSS file is pretty handy.
A word of warning, though — if you care about cross-browser compatibility (i.e. if you want your site to look the same in IE and Firefox), then make sure that you constantly view your site in both IE and Firefox as you build the layout of the site. When I designed my first site, I didn’t do this. The site looked great in IE. After I was “finished” with the design, I opened the site in Firefox, and… what a mess. Finding out exactly what was causing the problem took a while. I should have viewed the site in Firefox frequently as I was building and making the DIVs more complex… That way if something went wrong, I would only have to back up a few steps to find the problem.
There are a lot of ready-made DIV-based layouts available online if you don’t want to design your own. Here are a couple sites I have bookmarked:
http://glish.com/css/
http://checkweight.com/layout.html (view the source code)For Firefox / IE take a good look at ‘!important’ and you will find how you can manipulate the layout for each browser type.
Very handy.And yes…. DIVs are awesome for make the SE see what you want WHERE you want.
And then showing the surfer something else (same content better layout)
I still design in tables mainly cos it’s faster for me. I spend enough time doing design / development at work so I don’t have much time to exepriment…and if i can’t master it in 5 minutes then I’m afraid it gets relegated for when i have time, which is hardly ever! The only thing that i find with divs is that css lacks vertical control. I still can;t work out how to make footers stay at the bottom of the page with a 3 column layout!
I guess it’s best to design what youre comforatble with. there used to be the asp / php debate, but in the end both get the job done. what matters is the end result, and many good sites which are well high in the serps are done in tables.
