Tables In Wordpress, is it a good idea?

Sup fellas,

Ive got some knowledge in HTML/CSS so I managed to get the tables in the content but I was wondering if anyone heard or has first hand experience on the affects it could have on ranking if any.

This is all within the page content part of wordpress

The layout is just the basic tables within one large table (container) to allow for more flexibility. If you know a better way of doing this, I would love to hear.

Thanks

Hi,

If you google CSS vs tables you'll hear ALOT of very vocal people telling you CSS is the way forward, tables aren't for formatting and any one who uses them as such is a heratic and must be burned at the stake.
Try and use CSS colums within a wordpress enviroment though and you'll end up with mangled floats all over the place (honestly a nightmare!), your banner appearing in the middle of the screen and other mysterious artifacts that will have you even more annoyed with the editor than you imagined possible!

I'd say use tables if thats what you're comfortable with, I do at any rate.
(when tables were added for HTML they even stated they were there for formatting)
Two things to rememeber are:

1) images in a table WILL NOT display properly in internet explorer if there is text within the table. Only work around I've discovered that 100% works is nesting a table within a table (I'm sure a CSS guru will call me a twat for that)

2) you're going to have to use spacer images to lay the table out on screen (wordpress likes to delete formating tags whenever it can), again CSS gurus claim this will ruin your seo because the computer has to load in a 1k blank jpg (I wont even claim it doesn't but I personally dont know any on 56k dial up, do you?).

Can't disclose the site because its for the company I work for, but we're on the first page for most of the search terms in the areas we work in, and even outrank the main site of one of the products we supply if you search buy {product}! All from a old blog that only had regular content added since I joined the company 7 months ago, no key words in the title and linked to a corperate site that has a title that activly damages our rankings.

If I can do all that within 6-7 months with no SEO knowledge, 10 year old programing skills and a rather mediocre writing style WHILST using tables I really don't think theres much to worry about!
(or perhaps the niche I work in is so insanely wack that it could be dominated by those more skilled than me lol)

In my opinion, stay away from using tables. Nowadays everyone is using CSS (div's, span's, ect.) to control layout and display of websites. Tables are old school, and are so for a reason. It has been so long since I used tables I can't recall all the reasons, but I think mostly it was cross browser support and lack of flexibility. You can do everything with CSS that you can achieve with tables, and a hell of a lot more.

If you are making websites in 2011, use CSS.

EDIT: I re-read your post, and realized it was concerning ranking. I don't think tables really effect ranking. You would/should still use header tags (h1, h2, ect.), anchor text links, keywords in the text, and all the other on site SEO stuff you would normally do... All the tables are is TABLE, TR, TD tags in between, which isn't really analyzed.

However, Google loves wordpress... and Wordpress by default doesn't use tables that I can recall.. So I would say, if it works, don't change it up. Also ensure your code passes HTML and CSS validator checks. Google loves wordpress sites because of the way they are put together, with ease of navigating the site for the best user experience.