: Ok, here's the deal. It must be said, that tables are meant for tabular data, not layout. You're making accessibility a issue on both older mobile phones and text-based browsers used by the

@Kimberly868

Ok, here's the deal.

It must be said, that tables are meant for tabular data, not layout. You're making accessibility a issue on both older mobile phones and text-based browsers used by the visually-impaired.

Now, Google's algorithm most definitely takes that into account. I don't know the specifics algorithm, but I would guess that when someone is on a mobile phone, Google gives results that it knows is more appropriate to a mobile phone - so you might be losing a great deal of potential visitors if you use a table for layout.

Depending on your layout, you might also be making it difficult for the search engine to determine which text and paragraphs are related to which. This could be bad for your ranking, but probably not too much. With CSS layout it is, however, easier to ensure that the main content of your page is near the top, which always helps.

Thirdly, using tables for layout duplicates a lot of HTML markup for every page in your site that is loaded. This duplication will effect your page-load time, even if it is only slightly, but Google, among other engines, are known to use load time as one of their metrics in determining site rank.

All in all, I don't think the difference in main search engine ranking would be that great. There are definite advantages to using divs CSS for layout though, as noted in this post, and it should therefore be the recommended course of action, unless there's a really good reason for going the table route (which there rarely is).

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