Text inside a table. Will Google still pick it up?

[Chimbo]

I'm using lots of tables an any given page.
I wonder if Google (or any se) might not index the text when it's in a table.

[djr33]

Short answer: if you are using tables correctly, then everything will work well.


If you're using tables for layout, that's generally a bad idea for a few reasons. I think that search engines might either intentionally give lower rankings to pages like that or might get a little confused-- they certainly don't know how the page fits together since you may be using a table for organize important and unimportant information and the search engine won't know the difference.

But if you're using tables for their intended use: for "tables" of data (rows and columns of related bits of information) then that's fine of course. But generally this won't be your main content anyway so it won't be the main source of your search engine hits.

Tables are just plain old HTML like anything else, so search engines can read them, and they do read them. (As I said in some cases they might not read them well or might even rank a page lower for overusing tables-- in the wrong way, but tables in general are fine.)

Note that there are some things on a page that search engines actually can't read-- for example anything generated by Javascript or anything in Flash. (At the very least these are very limited.)

[Chimbo]

Short answer: if you are using tables correctly, then everything will work well.


If you're using tables for layout, that's generally a bad idea for a few reasons. I think that search engines might either intentionally give lower rankings to pages like that or might get a little confused-- they certainly don't know how the page fits together since you may be using a table for organize important and unimportant information and the search engine won't know the difference.

But if you're using tables for their intended use: for "tables" of data (rows and columns of related bits of information) then that's fine of course. But generally this won't be your main content anyway so it won't be the main source of your search engine hits.

Tables are just plain old HTML like anything else, so search engines can read them, and they do read them. (As I said in some cases they might not read them well or might even rank a page lower for overusing tables-- in the wrong way, but tables in general are fine.)

Note that there are some things on a page that search engines actually can't read-- for example anything generated by Javascript or anything in Flash. (At the very least these are very limited.)

Uh oh, I may have to redo my whole index page. But I like the way I can separate things with tables. But, I guess I can use divs, if they'd be ok with the se.

[djr33]

Google still can see the text. But it won't be the optimal way for search engines. More importantly, there are many other reasons not to use tables for layout. Do a quick search about "tables for layout" and you'll see why.

[jscheuer1]

I don't think search engines really care all that much about that sort of thing. For all they know, the table could contain the main content of the site. Like if it were a menu for a restaurant. You will get your best relevance (as far as markup goes) if you use h tags to signify important concepts and div or p tags to relate the details. But this is relatively minor compared to the title tag and the overall content. None of this has much to do with rankings though. That has more to do with how many other sites link to the site.

I'm not 100% certain of any of this. It's just common sense.

[djr33]

I don't mean to imply that it's a general rule that tables will confuse or annoy search engines. I have actually heard rumors that some search engines will rank a page lower if it has problems (for example, fake meta tags, duplicate content, and maybe bad markup), but I can't confirm that.

However, following the common sense thinking: search engines are roughly equivalent to text-only browsers. In a text-only browser, most of the organization you have on the page is gone and all you're left with is the type of content organized by the type of tags it is contained in and the hierarchy around those tags. So using the h tags (headers) is a good way to mark content, but more generally using the incorrect type of tags (tables for layout, as one major example) is likely to not give search engines a good chance at guessing what the visual structure of your page is so they won't know what parts are important, etc. It's possible it will work fine, but it's much more likely to be indexed the way you want if you use standards.

Note that with HTML5, there are now tags that specifically indicate parts of the page (purpose, not layout), so the web is moving toward more of a "tagged" system (no pun intended). That's not the case yet and search engines still have to guess, but at this point it can only help to use standard markup.


I will say that in the big picture this is a very minor issue. There are much more important things to worry about, and certainly on that list is that you shouldn't be using tables for layout for other reasons. But if you're asking the question "are tables [for layout] good for search engines?", then the answer is no, compared to a page using standard methods with divs and CSS for positioning. At the very least using standards won't hurt, and it might just help.
But I wanted to be clear that I'm not claiming this is a huge issue-- I'm just answering your question. In reality, you probably won't notice much of a difference using tables or not, regarding SEO.


John, specifically about the "menu" table concept, what you said only applies if a search engine does "flat" indexing. If any page containing the word "tomato" is added to a "tomato" list then whether or not it is in a table shouldn't matter. But if there is a restaurant containing "tomato" in the name, and another that just has the word buried somewhere in the table of its menu, then I think that the smarter search engines (including Google) will likely at least try to take that into account. There are many other factors that contribute to SEO and ranking, but all things being equal, I wouldn't be surprised if content in a table is not ranked quite as high as other content. It would still be somewhere in the search results, but maybe not at the top.

[bettydave]

Google can crawl anything inside the table.