An associate mentioned a site going from having hundreds of pages listed by Google to almost nothing... Among other things was a sliding banner code for making ads, or anything else, slide down long pages. Of course, there are only a few reasons for doing this and you know what? IT WORKS. After finding a similar problem with a different site, one that need the ad to be positioned in a DIV container because the original page was designed without this ad and then the old script defined the ad's starting position.

Why would the code be offensive? Some online advertisers don't want their ads displayed in ways that could be considered overbearing.

Maybe the search engine recognizes the type of script and associates it with pushy advertising.

The most important part could be shedding the weight of the script.

From the visitors point of veiw, when some of the scripts start running, it adds load time to the page and can make the ad popping up obvious. Some even cause the page to be unusable while waiting for it, not to mention, some scripts jerk. It was fun while it lasted, time to clean it up, keeping in mind the solution must be a DIV, to positition the ad properly, modifying the table just isn't worth it, DIVs are much lighter anyhow.

Here's just a quick note on the file size savings of a page with loads of links:
Started out 78516 bytes,
Ended 76885

Close to 2 kb. Remember, every inch counts.

The DIV code will probably end up in another post or article, times up.