14 Search Marketing Questions, Answered.

Cristian Mezei has posted a very nice list of forum user posted questions from digitalpoint.com. While I agree with the whole article and think its a definate read, the only problem I have is with number 11:

Many people are saying that CSS plays a big role for ranking HIGH on the search engines, and that Table sites are getting old and they don’t rank high as CSS (tableless) sites. How true is that?
Skionxb, that’s not true at all. IMHO, more than 70% of all the websites worldwide have HTML errors and are not valid. More than 80% of the websites worldwide are created with tables. They all rank good or at least the same as any other website (css or not, tableless or not, xhtml/css valid or not).

Just build a website for it’s content, and stop believing in the “if it’s valid and tableless, I’ll rank higher” myth.

Of course I'm quick to defend the benefits CSS can play in SEO with a comment to his wonderful article:

I would have to disagree with your answer to number 11. Anyone who’s ever deconstructed any web crawler you’ll notice the more clean code you can anticipate the better off the crawler is on capture your content and building more links to follow. Malformed HTML or what not can actually cause unexpected hiccups in a crawler, like endless loops, thus ultimately causing you the lose of the crawler indexing the page properly. Another plus with CSS is with absolute positioning you can easily put your “meaty” content at the very top of the source, and all of your re-occurring elements like Header, Side bars and a footer after the contents you really would like to be indexed. This may seem pointless but yet, again deconstruct any spider script/program and you’ll see the benefits this can reap. Other than this you’ve got a very nice list! +bookmarked! Keep it up.

Related Linkage:

Proof of CSS absolute positioning concept.

Cristian Mezei Original Post

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