The comparison table that ranks for nothing

The comparison table that ranks for nothing

Classic mistake: building your money comparison table in a JS-heavy plugin (TablePress with DataTables, or a React widget) that renders client-side. You see a beautiful sortable table; Googlebot sees an empty <div id="app"> and your 'best X vs Y' content is invisible to the index. Then you wonder why a thin blog post outranks your flagship comparison.

Second failure: the table holds your only mention of long-tail entities ('does X support PayPal') — if it's not in the rendered HTML, you rank for zero of them.

The fix:
— Use a plugin that outputs server-side <table> HTML (TablePress core without async loading, or AAWP for products)
— View source (Ctrl+U), not Inspect — Inspect shows post-JS DOM and lies to you
— Run the URL through the Rich Results test; if the table text isn't in the rendered HTML tab, it's not indexed

Gotcha: even server-rendered, tables wider than viewport get truncated on mobile and Google may treat hidden columns as lower weight. Stack to cards under 768px.

Bottom line: if Ctrl+U can't find your table cells, neither can Google.