Is DIV positioning considered proper practice?

will abusers of this technique cause me problems?

[PatrickDeese]

I am redesigning a well positioned website to update its look and since the top navigation is rather code heavy, and the body content for most sections is changed frequently, I decided to use absolute pixel postioning to put the div with the body content first in the HTML code, which makes it easier to maintain, as well as the advantages of having the rich content first in my HTML code.

I am worried, however, that abuse of this technique, vis a vis the use of negative pixel ranges to hide content off screen and et al will mean that site will be flagged for having "crooked" content.

Opinions? Experiences?

[startup]

Negative pix and <div> tags will work for awhile. One day this techique will cause trouble though. It will be your competitors that report you to the SEs. The best approach is to keep it on the page and build good sites.

[PatrickDeese]

Let me be clear. My site is *not* using negative pixel positioning. I am afraid that because of abuses by other designers, especially people who use off page positioning, the search engines will eventually consider *any* use of positioning, off *OR* on the page will be considered spammers.

[rogerd]

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.

[BicyclingGuitarist]

I just today figured out how to do the trick of placing my menu bars last in the html code but first on the page using css positioning on the navbar div. I never even suspected this could be bad for search engine placement. On the contrary, I thought that having the <h1> and other content first in the html code would be better from the search engine's perspective...What use would css positioning be if you couldn't use it without being punished somehow?

[gilmour]

I think that this is similar to the 1px shim discussion,...penalties will come from inappropriate use leading to abuse complaints.

Penalizing absolute positioning will be a step in the wrong direction for everybody.

I've wondered about the same thing regarding DHTML drop down menus,...technically it's hidden content (and absolute positioning),...but I didn't want to give up the oohs and aahs from the art director's short bus.