While it is generally beleived by some that the <div> structure could help optimization efforts, as far as rankings are concerned, is there anything ever stated by Google or the others that this is indeed true?
I shy from mentioning “verifiable evidence” when it comes to the mysteries of optimization. So I’ll leave it at that.
What springs to mind using DIVS instead of TABLES is that the former should have less formatting, reduce both page size and loading time.
Google has recently stated somewhere that they prefer fast pages.
What intrigues me is when I Google for an item and the first link reveals the page coded in tables with umpteen HTML and CSS errors. I can only think that SEO content and popularity is the deciding factor.
You have heard right tat Div tag is preferable than table. And this is because table tag increase the coading and also the loading time of a page. And as you might know loading time is one of the factor of SERP so people prefer DIV to decrease load time.
1 more benefit of using Div is it makes coding error free and easy to manage rather than having everything in single single row and putting many tags and code snippet which used in table
As John said, a well-designed semantic structure with CSS layout will usually be much lighter on code and cruft. There have been indications that Google prefers pages with a higher content:code ratio (ie, less code), although I don’t know whether that is still a significant factor. Google does prefer pages with accurate code, because then it can correctly interpret what each element means, rather than having to guess.
(Notice I have deliberately avoided the term <div>-based structure – it is a common mistake for people to switch their table-based layouts and then painstakingly recreate the entire structure with billions of nested <div>s, which is little better.)
Google tries to give people the best results for their search. While it might be a slight advantage to have a well-structured, lean, mean page that loads quickly … that isn’t going to counteract the great content or huge popularity of another page just because it has poor code. Standards may give you some help, but Google isn’t going to arbitrarily penalise the best page just because it doesn’t follow them.