Does 100% CSS really rank better?

Never seen any evidence whatsoever to back this up. It doesn't even make any sense.

Just done a quick search on some competitve phrases:

• property
• sex
• porn
• mortgage
• loans
• software
• poker
• gambling
• viagra
• music

Of those 10 only 3 are pure CSS (and one of those looked a little ropey). In markets competetive as some of those I am sure that if pure CSS gave any real advantage then it would be used.

Anyway, pure CSS has nothing to do with web 2.0

I've seen absolutely no evidence to support this theory at all - also it would appear that Google is currently up the shoot again for a lot of searches and looks like old data is being shown on some DCs which are switching a lot as well!

I don't think it necessarily would be a major factor but I think it would help. Google only looks at the first 100k of a page. If you're using CSS, you've probably got less code and more content in that 100k. A better code to content ratio. Although if you're using tables for a very basic framework without a lot of attributes and nested tables it might not make a huge difference.

I think this would be very difficult to test unless you made two very similar pages with very similar content that were started at the same time. There are so many things that go into a search engine ranking - separating this one and testing it independently might not be possible.

Our site is higher since we put in a more css-based layout, but I don't necessarily believe that that's the reason for it.

I agree with megan... i doubt any algorythm pays attention to wether a site is css or not but there may be indirect advantages to using full css...

I am starting to notice a lot more attention to proper mark-up in the SEO community lately. On the other hand, I have also read that Google is attempting to look at pages more like a human sees them on a screen. So that's why you hear things about it being able to read CSS and things like that.

It doesn't have a direct effect on rankings but it can help (indirectly.) You know all those sites that show off all the pure css sites, like cssvault and the million others? You could get a few quality backlinks from them, giving you a little boost in the rankings. The page does have to look nice too, pure css alone doesn't get you in

no actual stats for this but, it its better to get used to css... as one experiment I did a year back, "page" was coded in html only, html only with built-in css, and one with external css... well sums up megan is right, less bloated the code, more of your keywords getting indexed... and think of this... at least your already future compatible...

The site I did and my main revival have the same content, worded and layed out different sure but our related links and resources etc are very similar

I only did this site 100% CSS for this test, CSS is time consuming and a pain to edit, will stick with XHTML with a touch of CSS rather than all out CSS.

If it's less code = more content ... then really a table layout would win hands down.
how to become rich and famous"> ... navigation/logo editors note, foreword , how to become rich and famous...
vs
nested for nav
navigation
hacked for ie
logo * we could hide the text under the logo via h1 tag but isn't good *
editors note
foreword
how to become rich and famous

The table layout allows the keywords to be used straight off, this is of course if the code is read if not then in about the same place without tables, the keywords being in bold.
You also have to consider the head section, I am seeing more and more sites using three or more style sheets, plus the print one, thats four more lines of code which is a whole table >table,tr one line, td,/td on second line, /tr,/table on third

Um, that's not exactly directly comparable. In that case you'd do

includes logo, editors note, and forward
how to become rich and famous...

Your CSS part there added a lot of extra sections that wasn't included in your tabled code.

I agree with you about the multiple stylesheets. This is something I'm struggling with for this site. To keep things organized there have got to be more than one CSS file, although right now there are four and I'd like to reduce that a bit. HOWEVER, this way, all of that is written in one line instead of hundreds of bits of extra code littered throughout the site. It also allows me to change one call instead of sorting through all that HTML and finding all the instances of what I want to change. A much, much better way for a large and complex site. It's not just about putting an extra table in, at all!

I think it makes sense thatxhtml sites may rank better as all the SEs are activly loking for sites that are optimal for mobile phones. google even has an xhtml bot crawling pages out there.

What would google's xhtml bot do? anyone can put a xhtml doc tag on any page, ideally google would have to validate the page to make it useful