lynx as spider/bot simulator

lynx spider robot simulator

[eztrip]

I was just looking at my site in Lynx (text based browser) and noticed that my left sidebar shows up sort of as if it's at the top center of the page.
Is this how Googlebot sees the page? If so then it appears to me that this is where I should start my site text/keyword hierarchy using H1, H2, etc and have it flow down back to the center of the page and then to the right sidebar (the site has a fairly typical left sidebar/center main page/right sidebar approach)

The side effect of this is that potentially this could make the site look awful having big H1 tags there and I actually feel the site is for the user, not googlebot :-)

I've heard that changing H1's to appear as normal text using CSS is fine but I'm afraid that having all my H1 keywords and text located to the left sidebar and changing the text size to 9pt or something is going to throw a spam alert google's way.

Anyone?

Thanks
Mike

[Dreamquick]

My 2c;

Lynx is a neat text-only browser which everyone should try at least once, and it helps to give you an idea of how your page looks to a spider, however its by no means a definitive idea as you have eyes and lynx applies formatting, removing markup etc.

A spider and the algorythm behind it doesn't - so it can't appreciate how text is laidout on a page apart from the most fundamental ideas of layout. It can only interpret how your choice of layout is supposed to reflect page content.

The best true spider simulation is looking at the source in basic text-only edit view - you appreciate the text, the markup and their promenance within the page - as nice as lynx is it doesn't quite capture the essence of your pages as viewed through the eyes of a spider in their raw glory.

- Tony