Hello Dustin.

Yes, the table content is indexable by search engines. You can try searching for one of the rows from the table in our documentation, and You'll see that it comes up.

Please note that data will be indexed only for visible rows and columns. For example, if You have a large table with Server-side processing turned on, it shows 10 rows by default, and when You search for the data from those rows it will appear in the search engine. All rows still hidden, though, will not be shown.

If You have a smaller table, You can set view from "10" to "All", and then all the data will be indexed. Bear in mind that if You have a large table (several thousand rows), it might end up crashing the table and the website if You enable "All".

I hope You'll find this information helpful.

Best regards.

Hello again Dustin.

“Server-side processing” stands for table types when the data interaction operations (searching, filtering, switching pages, sorting) aren’t done by your site visitor’s browser (with JS), but instead by the MySQL server on your site. Usual tables fetch all the rows and output the entire table to the front-end all at once, and then split into pages using JavaScript. wpDataTables with server-side processing enabled fetches only those rows needed on the page at the exact moment. By default, it equals to the number of rows that administrator defines for the table in the “Display length” setting; the front-user can however, change it.

You can see the detailed explanation on server-side processing in our documentation.

Google sheets can't be used for server-side processing; it supports importing data from popular office software programs, and it stores all the data online. 

The data is read from the data source every time the page loads, so when your tables are large (more than 2000-3000 cells) this source won’t be the right choice since the page with large tables will load slow, or even crash after reaching a certain size. Also, there is a cache on the Google side, so when you update the table it might take up to 5-15 minutes to be reflected in wpDataTable.

As I said, the search engine would be able to fetch the information from pages 2, 3, 4 or 5 if those pages are loaded. When You select how many rows You want to be displayed is what the page currently has, so the search engine cannot look for plugin's data that has not yet been displayed on front-end, but the information displayed on the page at that time.

I hope You'll find this information useful.

Best regards.