SEO Tycoon

**RedMatrix** · 10-19-2006, 12:38 AM

Is it true that SE's don't like tables (for non tabular data) ?

I am wondering why my forum isn't getting on the SERPs yet, it's been 2 weeks, and my friends' sites (using phpbb) are already on the SERPs.

Is it possible vb's table design is hurting me?

**ADAM Web Design** · 10-19-2006, 12:47 AM

Your bigger issue is that you (probably) don't have any inbound links pointing to your site. Search engines visit sites and pages in their index looking for other sites and pages to add to their index.

There are other reasons to go with tableless designs besides SERPs, but they certainly won't hurt either.

**RedMatrix** · 10-19-2006, 01:24 AM

I have about a thousand signature links pointing to my site, but only 194 are showing up on google, 19 in yahoo, zero in MSN, 19 in AltaVista.

But then again, my site is only 2 weeks old.

I guess I should concentrate on getting niche links, with good anchor tags.

**ADAM Web Design** · 10-19-2006, 01:43 AM

What is your site, anyway?

**linkmanager** · 10-19-2006, 06:22 AM

try to get more links to Your forum in others sites....

**vangogh** · 10-19-2006, 05:24 PM

David it will probably take more than 2 weeks for the search engines to find all those forum signatue links. Google will also never show them all. They'll only show a small sample of the links they know about.

Still signature links in forums are not going to be weighted very much. Any link that's really easy to get will carry less weight than a link that's harder to get.

As far as using divs instead of tables it probably won't make a big difference. There are a lot of reasons to use css to layout a site, but at the moment seo isn't really one of those reasons. You can code a site that ranks well or poorly using either tables or divs. Some would argue that there is some benefit to using css, but it's more than just using divs and I'm still unconvinced it would give more than a minor benefit at the moment.

If you're coding a site and deciding how to layout the design I'd say go with css. If you already have a site that's been coded in tables I wouldn't worry about it, though I do think css is the better way to code a website.

**ADAM Web Design** · 10-19-2006, 09:30 PM

* smacks vangogh and points at his sig *

Hey, c'mon, man. Don't disrespek.

**vangogh** · 10-20-2006, 04:15 PM

Funny. I guess I deserved that smack. I didn't say I don't use links in forum sigs. And I obviously use keywords in the anchor text, but I honestly don't believe they have a huge impact in where any of those pages rank.

If they did I would rank for a lot more terms than I do at the moment.

I'm going to try what I can though, since even a minor effect is better than none. The links are more for the people who click directly on them. I do get a decent amount of traffic through the links themselves regardless of how search engines see them.

And I do even tell people to add sig links all the time. I just didn't want David to expect he'd be on the first page of search results based on sig links alone.

Thanks for smacking some sense into me.

**ADAM Web Design** · 10-21-2006, 02:43 AM

Hey, no problem, buddy.

Now get your butt on MSN more frequently when I'm there.

**chrishirst** · 10-21-2006, 08:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RedMatrix

Is it true that SE's don't like tables (for non tabular data) ?

No it's not true