I’m not disagreeing with anything you say. I guess I’ve never been convinced of the seo benefits. Even though I think css is the better way, I’ve seen some very poor and slow loading css driven sites and some pretty well coded and quick table driven sites.

I think there’s more potential for errors with tables, but I know there are people who can code a search friendly site that’s still table-driven. I would never develop the site that way, but I know there are people who can. You can still develop an accessible site with tables. Even thought there’s more potential for errors, it doesn’t mean there will be errors.

The load time though, is now reason enough to recommend css over tables for seo. I just wrote this post a couple months before Matt Cutts mentioned how some at Google were pushing for that to be a factor.

By the way sorry the code in your comment didn’t display. I’m not logged into the site right now, but next time I am, I’ll see if I can fix it. The secret is you have to use < and > for the angle brackets or it gets interpreted as actual code. You can probably also wrap the code in a blockquote.

‘Search engines don’t care one bit if the code behind your page uses tables or divs. Search engines are interested in your content, not your code.’

I agree to an extent but I have here 2 very good reasons why tables are definately worse for SEO:

1. Accessibility issues arise more frequently due to excessive coding – ok so this can be attributed to bad coding but it’s such a common issue that it has to be taken into account

2. As you mentioned, pages built in tables have to load twice (something I didn’t know until reading this post) add to this that the example you showed:

Some content here

and

Some content here

clearly illustrates how much extra code is required for tables. With many sites (big, e commerce sites for example) having many different sections of text and images and other media throughout a page the code just grows and grows, taking browsers longer to load page content.

With Google’s latest algorithm update (Caffeine) emphasising page load times as a SE ranking factor it is now more important than ever from an SEO stand point to reduce the amount of code on a webpage.

IE is a lot more standards compliant than you’re giving it credit for. It certainly lags behind other browsers, but for the most part IE fro version 7 on is css2 compliant.

CSS is better in both theory and practice. You do have to put in a little time to learn how to layout a site with css, but once learned it’s not hard to do.

I can understand your frustration, but it’s not the fault of css. Many people are able to build sites using css as a layout and getting them to work cross-browser including IE without any difficulty.

I’d rather switch my page to tables, than screw around with IE. I don’t even have a copy of IE to work with. I agree that CSS is much better in theory, but as long as people use IE and Microsoft refuses to be standards compliant, I don’t think CSS for structure is the greatest idea.

Nice presentation by the way. The comics are great.

As I see it, table layouts have precisely two advantages:

1. Outlook 2007 has a brain-dead rendering engine, so if you’re producing HTML e-mails, you need to use tables.

2. Table cells are the only elements in HTML that expand and contract based on adjacent content.

That’s it. If you’re not creating HTML e-mails, or unless you have some overriding need to have part of your page scale because of the amount of content on other parts of your page, there’s no reason to use tables for layout.