Tables

I have picked up some rumors lately, stating that tables might hurt your ranking. Especially if you have your menu links in the left hand column of your page (i.e., the first cell of a multi-column table).

Can anyone confirm these rumors?

Well the main thing you sould consider when using table is that the spider searches for text from the upper left and down so putting your importent text in this order will make sure the spider sees the importent text first.
if you would like to see how your page looks in the eye of a spider visit.http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

I still can not see how this could hurt a ranking....

lets say you have a page that has a left link menu
if you are not using the keywords in that menu the spider see un important words

You must know that all ready that as the text appear highr or closer to the body tag the spider cosider it more important.
For example: IF WE WANT TO PROMOTE THE KEYWORD LEATHER SHOES

Leather shoes BLA BLA BLA BLA
BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA

Is better than BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA
BLA BLA BLA leather shoes

So when you use link menu on the upper left table you basicly eat the good place to put your most important keywords

But would it not be a good idea, if not an imperative, to inlude your keywords in the menu? After all, your menu should reflect your site content. You would then achieve a high keyword prominence, but also a high keyword link prominence.

I think that the statement is more of a - "if you don't include your keywords in your headings, you could hurt your ranking...". In other words stating the obvious.

Let me state categorically - yes absolutely

The most important words for google are the first text words that coincide withe the title etc - there is no reason to worry whether they are links or not.

Just remember that google is not coming at you from the first page .... WHEN IT DISPLAYS... it is not a directory

So once it has found the page thru links etc it then works out the importance of The Page and what it contains. So if you use a table top left cell is very important for text and weighting

OK

If you are really worried about it there is always the table trick

I personally didnt go that route but intentionaly added a paragraph or two as a primer before my navigation links on my homepage. A redefined h2 tag did the job nicely :-)

OK

But you can use iframe

start with normal text before the table first cell with your most important text on the left and logo etc in the second cell on the right and then the second row which contains an iframe for example perhaps on the left with your menu and your data in another on the right.

always link your pages BACK to the home page or something similar back to the original source of the link that google came in from

What about this then: http://www.centum.no - the site is in norwegian, but should not matter.

Here, the menu is at the top of the page, generating a lot of HTML before the actual content appears. How would you go about to work around this?

CSS absolute positioning just after body tag for the main text content.
Well that's how I'd do it anyway. To be honest I wouldn't bother doing anything with that example as the main content isnt that far down in the source code. I've certainly seen worse.

Alan

But you have text before all of that...... so concentrate on that text - google if I remember picks up 30 characters

Put that text in the "SEARCH PHRASE WORDS" that you require and are also in the title etc

But do not forget that the pages are more important ultimately - there is a way of making Mini Sites (one page direction centers on the same site that will drag in huge rankings if done properly) that perhaps you should lead into