I was just chatting with a "commercial web dev" in Manhattan while at the table there was also a New York Times site app developer in presence (who had been offered a position at Google before deciding to stay in NYC) and we were discussing SEO as regards to tabled sites or strict CSS sites.

The general opinion (actually the mantra chant) was that strict CSS was the ONLY way to go for the best SEO capability. Since I am in the very beginning stages of choosing a Drupal theme or themes to play with, I was wondering if anyone has any theories or practical reasons regarding CSS or tables?

From a quick cursory search online (Google) in this regard I seem to find that Google (or any other search engine) can easily spider any site regardless of tables or not and that good design and content is much more important than whether a site uses only CSS or has some tables in the mix.

Thanks in advance for any meaningful input.

AK

Edited by: VeryMisunderstood; Moved from Post installation to General Discussion

Comments

VM’s picture

I looked into this not long ago and the concensus I found is that it really doesn't matter. Though from what I read there may be a problem with SEO and table problems may come into play with uber nested tables. Though realistically speaking, I don't know why any one would nest a table in a table in a table in a table.

Nick Lewis’s picture

Tables are bad em kay. Well not really... They badness of tables has more to do with bad practices that accompany table based layouts than the actual benefits of using straight css layouts.

The problem with tables -- imho -- is that they are often used by people that have not a clue what they are doing. you see [td id="page-title"] which search engines don't understand like they would [h1 id="page-title"]. Mambo, for instance, was so SEO unfriendly because they'd apparently never heard of an h1,h2,h3 tag, just td tags.

Beyond that, tables will place a severe limitation on the designs you can accomplish. A couple great alternatives to tables are the CSS frameworks:
http://www.blueprintcss.org/
http://960.gs/

And you'll have hard time finding decent drupal themes based on tables these days... we have some in core, true, but we want them dead, and want to eat their children before they spawn their substandard brood of more pointless table based layouts.

Only bargain buddy web design still uses tables for layouts, imho. And their only motive is sheer laziness and inability to learn a better way.

--
"I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect." - George Carlin
--
Personal: http://www.nicklewis.org
Work: http://www.entermedianow.com

--
"I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect." - George Carlin
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Personal: http://www.nicklewis.org
Work: http://www.zivtech.com

AshokanKid’s picture

Ok., well., there is one theme that we have been playing with that def uses table elements and so this is why we were curious. We really like the basics of the theme and so are hoping that the minimal use of table elements is not a problem here.

The theme is Twilight right off the Drupal.org site; http://drupal.org/project/twilight if you want to take a look and let us know what you think. Much appreciated.,

AK

Nick Lewis’s picture

It is a nice looking theme. And the author's website seems to understand that you don't use a tr,td tag for everything, so I'd say its probably safe. They had no demo links, so wasn't able to take a look at the theme itself. But the the author's site showed some good habits, so I wouldn't worry about it. Looks fine.

--
"I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect." - George Carlin
--
Personal: http://www.nicklewis.org
Work: http://www.entermedianow.com

--
"I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect." - George Carlin
--
Personal: http://www.nicklewis.org
Work: http://www.zivtech.com

AshokanKid’s picture

Oh., Hi there Nick;

I've been on your site / blog in the past after I Googled something or other (themes?) and found a resource link back to info on your site. Cool.,

Thanks again.

AK

svejk7’s picture

Why is it always stated as Tables versus CSS? I use CSS on all of my many tables and their elements. I know I am exposing a lot of ignorance here and that this is a dangerous place to voice such sentiments, but perhaps there will be learning. So, shouldn't it be put as Tables v. Divs? Both can be styled with a stylesheet or inline (and Divs can be given HTML attributes). Both can be nested to the point of absurdity if one desires. I will admit that if I were using a text editor to make web pages I would never touch Tables and that I very rarely nest tables. But Divs have given me too much trouble in resizing to content (and resizing to the content of nested or adjacent Divs) and in responding to different screen resolutions. I also find it easier to obtain browser compatibility with Tables. SEO has not been a problem as a number my tabley pages are on Google's first pages for my chosen keywords. Now, what am I missing?