Tables

[Buddy M]

I'm not sure, but I recall many years ago that creating tables for your (my) websites is not very good for SEO, and can actually hurt the website with search engines. I dont remember the reason behind the statement. Does anyone know if this is true?

[Slawete]

I can say only that many years ago tables(<table></table>) were used for many purposes, especially for site's structure as it allowed to position elements. But that was ages ago, now we have responsive layouts and thanks god no need to use <table>. Now <table> is used only when the user have to see a table. If the element you want to create won't look like a table, better not use <table>.

[Michael Martinez]

I'm not sure, but I recall many years ago that creating tables for your (my) websites is not very good for SEO, and can actually hurt the website with search engines. I dont remember the reason behind the statement. Does anyone know if this is true?

The story is complicated. I've been building Websites since 1996 and things have changed a lot since then.

Tables were the original page layout mechanism, according to the RFC that defined them. There was no CSS at the time.

Search engines were very simplistic at the time. They often had trouble extracting text in a linear form (called "linearization") from table-based layouts because people would nest tables inside tables inside tables and then spread the text across the page. To the person viewing a page on a desktop screen, everything looked pretty cool. But to a search engine it looked like gibberish.

I hated editing all those tables so I adopted a fairly simple table-based layout that didn't interfere with the linearization of the text. But that wasn't mobile-friendly.

So when Google began campaigning to get everyone to switch to mobile-friendly designs, the old school ways of designing table-based layouts more-or-less gave way.

In recent years I've developed some simple ways to layout pages using mobile-friendly, responsive tables. But there is a downside. You can't do a lot of the things people are accustomed to seeing on pages when you design with responsive tables.

You can still embed tables in responsive designs, but to get all the design features you need, you'll still need to rely on CSS enhancement, and mobile-friendly stylesheets as well as desktop stylesheets.

A full-time developer who does this stuff every day of the week might be able to lay out table-based designs for you. CSS has developed many enhancements for table elements and their structures. But I think you'd still be sacrificing some useful features (maybe not - I don't consider myself to be knowledgeable enough to know for sure).

Bing and Google are able to linearize text regardless of how it's embedded in the page. They have algorithms that pre-render everything so that they can understand what is supposed to go where.

But Google is now (or will soon) prefer the mobile layout over the desktop layout for rankings.

As far as modern search engines are concerned (in 2020), HTML tables don't create any problems for indexing or ranking.