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Besides not conforming to modern web standards and not being responsive/mobile friendly, are there any SEO penalties associated with using, say a tabular website?

For example, if the architecture was one giant table containing the site content in columns and rows.

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In June 2009 (five and half years ago!), Matt Cutts of Google stated:

"If you have the best site, we will try to find it and we will try to rank it highly, regardless of whether it's table-based or CSS-based."

Source: Matt Cutts, Google Webmaster Central, June 2009

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL_GZwoC2uQ (duration: 49 seconds)

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  • This is one area that SEO hasn't changed in 10 years. Google still doesn't care about your markup as long as your your visitors find it useful and appealing. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Dec 10 '14 at 1:54
  • It has been a while since I read this (about 2 years), Google stated that the existing parser (for lack of a better term) after your page is fetched, was originally based upon HTML 4.0 and was updated over the years without degrading it's understanding of HTML 4.0 and versions in between. In the document I read, it advised that HTML 4.2 is likely the best standard to adhere to and that mixing HTML tags (by version) as long as it was compliant and HTML 4.0 or greater was okay. I suspect that even today, with all of the advances and updates that Google has had to make, this may still be true. – closetnoc Dec 10 '14 at 2:53

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