SEO Theme

[staseo]

Well, this is very simple GS theme - without external CSS, inline style, table and flexible layout. The old style HTML.


http://get-simple.info/extend/theme/staseo/48/

[Zegnåt]

Interesting, though I would never use it. (And wouldn’t advice others to use it either.)

From a SEO point of view, very little has been changed from the default theme.

However, other points have been hurt. The way you added style to the elements does not validate as XHTML and never has. If you’re planning to use “old style HTML” change your theme to HTML.

It’s flexible, that sounds like an accessibility pro. But in reality you’re hurting accessibility. Mediawiki has a point against tables for presentation. Somewhat more opinionated (but valid) points about this use of tables has also been featured by WordPress Freelancer.

[staseo]

Interesting, though I would never use it. (And wouldn’t advice others to use it either.)

From a SEO point of view, very little has been changed from the default theme.

However, other points have been hurt. The way you added style to the elements does not validate as XHTML and never has. If you’re planning to use “old style HTML” change your theme to HTML.

It’s flexible, that sounds like an accessibility pro. But in reality you’re hurting accessibility. Mediawiki has a point against tables for presentation. Somewhat more opinionated (but valid) points about this use of tables has also been featured by WordPress Freelancer.

Try to check this theme with firefox,opera,IE e.t.c try to see it via IE6! I think, that the 4-5.5 will work too. Even browsers without css support, will show the site in good way (try 2 disable CSS on firefox).
Yes, the theme is flexible- width and height, fits the size of your screen.BY the way, try to render it with small screen, like mobile.

From SEO pont of view: the little difference is: the crawler or what ever, can calculate the relative position (and distance) of the headings, content and menu - this parameter helps to understand, wich part of your site is more important, than other. - This is my opinion only.

[Zegnåt]

Warning: I might sound a little annoyed/angry in this reaction. I noticed this when I read it myself. I am not angry with you, so no worries ;-) I just didn’t want to rewrite everything.

This is also one of my biggest replies ever. Take your time, hahaha.

---

Accessibility is a very important subject to me, so I always have arguments ready. I’m looking forward to your comment!

Try to check this theme with Firefox, Opera, IE etc. try to see it via IE6! I think, that the 4–5.5 will work too. Even browsers without CSS support, will show the site in good way (try 2 disable CSS on Firefox).

Sure, I didn’t say anything about that either. However Internet Explorer 3 supported CSS already, and since you’re mostly just setting colours you could’ve used CSS and still be compatible with all IE starting with version 3.

How many browsers can you name right now that don’t support CSS? Without using Google? I can think of only one, Lynx. I have Lynx installed for accessibility testing and can tell you that it completely ignores your table anyway.

Now try this theme with any of those browsers you mentioned using JAWS or VoiceOver. Because that’s where my accessibility issues lie:

As you navigate each table cell, VoiceOver speaks the column heading and cell contents, followed by the row and column numbers, such as “row three, column one.”

Yes, the theme is flexible- width and height, fits the size of your screen.BY the way, try to render it with small screen, like mobile.

Did you try this? Most modern mobile webbrowsers use the WebKit engine and work completely with normal flexible-width CSS. You will need to test older mobile browsers.

I tried Opera Mobile, which I believe was a major Java browser on older phones. They also have an emulator so it was the easiest to test. This browser ignores your table, so again, you don’t need a table here to make it flexible. (Screenshot attached.)

The little difference is: the crawler or what ever, can calculate the relative position (and distance) of the headings, content and menu—this parameter helps to understand, which part of your site is more important, than other.

Do you have any articles on this or is it really just your opinion? I thought crawlers used source order to assign importance. First thing in the source gets most importance and it goes down from their. Source order is more easily controlled with CSS than tables.

Good source code will have the page content as clost to the top of the HTML document as possible, and the least important elements such as sidebars and footers last.

(Quote from the SEO Checklist on SEO blog RagePank.)

PS: As mentioned by Joe Clark in his book Building Accessible Websites (chapter 10 on tables) HTML 3.2 allows tables for presentational markup. So if you use the following Doctype I will take back all I have said:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">

This doesn’t fix any of the accessibility problems, but at least you show people you’re using HTML standards from the ’90s.

[staseo]

@Zegnåt ,
Ha ha, thanks for Your killer reply! About the Accessibility - i think your are right in web-standarts point of view. I have a lot of websites, that the layout built with css only, and i like it.

I must to admit, that i am not accessibility expert at all,

I am SEO expert .

The theme that i have created - is more for better SEO, yes, crawlers (Google does it better than others) can read tables and understand, what sell is more important. They will never admit, but this is what they do.

In the bottom line - the content is the most important thing.
If we will take 2 websites, that (in theory only) have the same content and hundreds SEO signals are the same- the one that built with tables has a better chance to win.

If you will ask me- i prefer to make pages built with tables and divs together ! Yes- divs inside cells, and tables inside divs!
Ugly code- but rocket-SEO with CSS, to control them all!
CSS and table layouts have their own benefits, i love to use them both, at the same time.

Sounds funny, but the most successful websites on this planet are made this way (of cource, this is not the only reason :+) )


This is my opinion, based on years of SEO experiments.

[Carlos]

Just a comment. Tables -if used with moderation- might not be that bad... Google (news), Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, just to give some examples, use them for layout.

[Zegnåt]

Since I’m not a SEO expert I’m not going to give too much of a reply on that, however, some points I do want to put in for debate:

Reducing the ratio of code to content, using keywords in your header tags, and replacing header GIFs with actual text will all help your sites get better search engine results.

(Quote from Seybold’s Google is blind.)

Wether this is true is highly debated.

Google is most interested in the value of the indexable content on your site and its relevance to specific search queries taking account of all factors, including geolocation.

Google is not interested in whether you use tables or CSS or both or neither.

(Quote from a reply on Google’s Webmaster Central.)

Googlebot makes its best attempt to get at the indexable content on the page and discard all the overhead coding that does not affect the relevance to what people are looking for.

(Quote from a reply on Google’s Webmaster Central.)

This seems to go against your “opinion”. Google is only interested in clear text and will simply ignore whatever element is used to contain this text unless the container element has a special meaning to text importance (headers).

And now for the most interesting point: crawlers have a size limit. This means they will ignore files after a certain size or will not crawl all the content of the file.

Sitepoint published a test on search engine indexing limits in 2006 called, here is an interesting quote:

The leading search engines differ considerably in terms of the the amount of page text they’re able to crawl. For Yahoo!, the limit is 210KB; for Google, 520KB; and for MSN, it’s 1030KB. Pages smaller than these sizes are indexed fully, while any text that extends beyond those limits will not be indexed.

Web pages written with tables usually have more HTML, meaning that you’re wasting a lot of the bytes on HTML tags and are going to lose out on the amount of text that is being indexed.

This study was written a long time ago in internet terms, but in October 2009 a Google employee mentioned it and also stated:

There is most likely still a point where search engines say “enough is enough” and stop picking up the rest of the content on a page.

In April this year Google announced it was going to use page speed in their ranking:

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed—that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

Exactly what Google sees as speed nobody knows. If it’s just file size than you will only be penalised a little, if it is render speed your tables are going to lose you a lot of points.

As Seybold can show you, old school tables can get really big and complex. Browsers don’t like it either:

The layout algorithm for tables is much harder, the browser often has to wait for the whole table to load before it can begin to layout the content. Additionally, caching of the layout won’t work (CSS can easily be cached).

(Quote from an answer to “Why not use tables for layout in HTML?” on Stack Overflow.)

As you can see, I really like sources and articles, I’m not a big fan of opinions. Do you have any documentation on your SEO experiments? I think many SEO websites will be interested in them.

Carlos: the fact that big sites use tables doesn’t make them right. They probably don’t care about accessibility and/or SEO on the places where they use tables. Especially Google wouldn’t have to care for SEO. Facebook is mostly oriented around there users and selling their information to third parties, they would even have a reason for obfuscating their content to crawlers.

Great discussion here guys! I hope we’ll get to some kind of conclusion.

[staseo]

Thank for excellent reply!
Zegnat, i have never wrote, that css is bad for SEO.

I would like repeat it again:
"I prefer to make pages built with tables and divs together ! Yes- divs inside cells, and tables inside divs! "

- I will use both. Hey, I even have SEO theme for WordPress at Staseo.com - and guess what: its css, no tables or td's, divs and classes only.

What i am trying to say, that content is the most important and how You display it too

The only difference from my point of view - is the physical position of elements on page:

with CSS and clean code only, the crawler can see what in the top of the page, middle and bottom. With tables layout - the top, middle,bottom,right and left. In some cases- this is important signal.

Again-this is my opinion, based on SEO activity and my personal experience with lot of websites that have different ranking positions(big competition), from 1 place to 20. I have 1 position websites that made with css only, and tables only and both.(mixed)

I have asked Mat Cutts(Google webmaster questions) about it- is it true(crawler that calculates position via inline style better than CSS or not), but my question was ignored because of users, that should vote for it first, in order the King Matt will answer it. They did not...
so, maybe I am 2smart or 2 stupid. One of them should be true

Please read this killer article(no, its bigger, its a book):
http://www.decloak.com/dev/csstables/CSS_Tables_01.aspx - read them all, some funny but very cool and true articles.

What do You think?
(Anyway, the debates between square people(tables) and those that have divitis and classitis virus, will never end.
Just try to search "tables vs div" and You will see )

[staseo]

The final page have links to other good articles :http://www.decloak.com/dev/csstables/CSS_Tables_16.aspx

[Oleg06]

it's really funny article and in Russia, thank God, IE is gradually disappearing

[staseo]

it's really funny article and in Russia, thank God, IE is gradually disappearing

Hm, maybe until Microsoft will sell Windows, the IE will still be there...as default browser

[Oleg06]

This of course, but they have hurried to support css3

[Zegnåt]

Until Microsoft will sell Windows, the IE will still be there… as default browser

Microsoft is not allowed to have Internet Explorer as a forced standard with Windows in Europe. They must, thanks to our weird laws, offer you Opera/Firefox/etc as alternatives when you first start Windows.

[creativewriters]

It's very interesting information. If you are need SEO work contact this site.