rogerd - 2:05 am on Apr 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Patrick, there's no good reason for search engines to penalize the use of absolute positioning when it merely shifts the position of visible content on the page. This is particularly true, IMO, as more designers move away from complex table structures and toward CSS.

There are no absolute answers to this kind of question, of course, but if you are comfortable that you are doing nothing dicey I wouldn't worry about it.