An Interesting discussion happening in High Rankings Forum

A member named WD-SEO asks

In the last couple of months I’ve working a lot with CSS. Thanks to this technology, I’ve been able to improve my designs and literally think out of the box. However, I haven’t started a SEO campaign with any of the CSS Designs.

I couldn’t help thinking about the early days of SEO when there were all these theories that help you structure the content with tables. One of the old myths, which I still believe, was that the more complex the table structure of the website is; the more difficult it is for the search engine crawlers to find the information. There’s where the old concept of SEARCH ENGINE FREINLY DESIGN comes into the picture.

One the top competitors of the company that I work for has a SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY DESING. By this I mean, a very simple three columns, no rows, no inside tables. The information is displayed in the simplest way ever. This is certainly a concept that I disagree with. My designs are well structure and apart from being pretty and catchy to the eyes of future clients the do rank very well in the search engines. So you guys may be asking your self, what’s my problem?

My problem is that even thought I rank in the top ten for almost the 75% of all the keywords that my competitors has also targeted, they are always on the top. These guys have no clue whatsoever of good SEO, the stuff keywords everywhere in their pages; however (and here comes my theory), because the fact that search engine Crawlers/bots do not have to spend a lot time drilling the table structure and they find the information right there, the crawlers rank my competitor faster and better. On the other hand, my design is excellent, well table-structured but the crawlers have to go down a couple of levels into the structure to find the information, I’m always behind my competitors. I know that even though many of my clients design to buy the products that we sell, the fact remains the same, who’s on the top is more visible; therefore, it has a bigger chance to sell more.

Now the real question and juice comes along:

What would happen if I provide the search engines with the same design, not table structured anymore but CSS. Since CSS and Content work separately but are joint to together by the code, maybe the crawler will not have to struggle with the structure, find all the information right away and rank me better.

Rand (SEOMOZ) replied back

Tables vs CSS makes no appreciable difference from everything I’ve seen WD.

Sure there are rare instances where the table code is so bungled that the content can’t be crawled, but that’s another story. If you had valid nested tables and valid css you’re not going to see any difference in rankings because of the coding methods used.

There are a ton of good reasons to use CSS. SEO is not one of them though.

here are some more replies to this topic

Are there then problems with tables and crawlers finding the content?

No. And there have never been problems, if the tables have been coded correctly.

The problem has never been Tables, just shoddy coding. Tables just got the blame.

Check the discussion here – Css Design Vs. Table Design – Effects In SEO