Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Div tags vs. Tables
-
Is there any reason NOT to code in tables (other than it being outdated) for SEO reasons?
-
Tables render slightly slower than divs, but it's not the end of the world. In general, you should avoid tables unless you're working with actual tabular data, but if tables make your life easier they're not going to have much impact on SEO, if any.
-
Typically table layouts takes up more code than div layouts (and thus increase load times). Faster websites typically rank higher (with all things being equal),
See Matt Cutts video on the subjected (though--pretty old).
-
Using tables in your HTML will produce a poor mobile experience. Because the world is moving more towards mobile everyday, we can't ignore it, and neither can search engines.
I don't think search engines will punish you for having table tags in your HTML, but if your site is consistently producing high bounce rates from mobile users - you're not really winning are you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
Can a H1 Tag Have Multiple Spans Within It?
H1 tags on my client's website follow the template [Service] + [Location]. These two have their own span, meaning there are two spans in an H1 tag. class="what">Truck Repair near class="where">California, CA How do crawl bots see this? Is that okay for SEO?
Technical SEO | | kevinpark1910 -
Canonical Tag when using Ajax and PhantomJS
Hello, We have a site that is built using an AJAX application. We include the meta fragment tag in order to get a rendered page from PhantomJS. The URL that is rendered to google from PhantomJS then is www.oursite.com/?escaped_fragment= In the SERP google of course doesnt include the hashtag in the URL. So my question, with this setup, do i still need a canonical tag and if i do, would the canonical tag be the escaped fragment URL or the regular URL? Much Appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RevanaDigitalSEO0 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
403s vs 404s
Hey all, Recently launched a new site on S3, and old pages that I haven't been able to redirect yet are showing up as 403s instead of 404s. Is a 403 worse than a 404? They're both just basically dead-ends, right? (I have read the status code guides, yes.)
Technical SEO | | danny.wood1 -
Multilingual Website - Sub-domain VS Sub-directory
Hi Folks - Need your advice on the pros and cons of going with a sub-domain vs a sub-directory approach for a multi lingual website. The best would be a ccTLD but that is not possible now, so I would be more interested in knowing your take on these 2 options. Though, I have gone through http://www.stateofsearch.com/international-multilingual-sites-criteria-to-establish-seo-friendly-structure/ and this somewhat vouches for a sub-directory, but what would you say'?
Technical SEO | | RanjeetP0 -
Two different canonical tags on one page
Due to an error, some of my pages now have two canonical tags on them. One is correct and the other goes to a nonsense URL (404 page). I know I should ideally remove the incorrect ones, but it's a big manual job. Are they doing any harm? Can I just leave them there and let Google figure it out? The correct ones are higher up in the code. Will this make a difference? Any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO
Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here. For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar. I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site. When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message. Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks. *** Does this make a difference SEO wise? Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are? Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same? Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?
Technical SEO | | twilightofidols0