Tables vs. CSS - An SEO Experiment

Jill Whalen of High Rankings and Dan Thies of Sitepoint are in for a little contest - is CSS better for SEO, or does it not matter? My position is that it does, and I have enough empirical evidence through SEO with CSS to stand by that, but this should be interesting:

If you’d like to know why I don’t agree with Jill & Scottie, aside from actually testing this stuff which is easy enough, you may want to read my article on how search engines work. Pages 5 & 6 will be of particular interest, as is Dr. Garcia’s discussion of the vector space model, if you don’t mind getting tired head from looking at equations.

What Jill & Scottie are suggesting is that search engines would analyze the following two snippets of text and find them exactly equal:

Home About Us Products Services Privacy Subscribe To Our Newsletter! Name Email Copyright 2003-2005 MegaGlopTronInc, Inc. Search term here bla bla bla…

Search term here bla bla bla… Home About Us Products Services Privacy Subscribe To Our Newsletter! Name Email Copyright 2003-2005 MegaGlopTronInc, Inc.

I just don’t believe that’s true. In fact, it is demonstrably not true.

Now the challenge:

Happy to oblige, Jill, test pages are online here and here.

Watch this SERP for the results.

Watching…