Google, CSS Positioning with negative margins

What does Google think?

[travisk]

I'm about to launch a redesigned site that makes use of CSS positioning. There is one div that has a ~100 pixel negative top margin in an external CSS file. The div only contains a small amount of content, as it is part of a page footer. The use of a negative margin in this case is completely legitimate, but will Google agree? I've been told that they are penalizing for sketchy use of negative margins, but how complex do they get?

[moishe]

I use a negative margin to center my site and rank top ten for my #1 single KW in G so from my experience it does not seem to cause a penalty.

[shri]

Matt Cutts mentioned that this technique could be ummm ... (not sure of his exact words) flagged for suspicious behaviour.

Would be interesting to see how it works, given that there are a couple of popular CSS menus which use negative margins and 0 dislay height type techniques.

[surfgatinho]

I'd like to think any search engine would be fairly easy going on positional CSS for the time being as it doesn't seem to be a very exact science, gives different results in different browsers and is not well understood by the majority of webmasters yet.

I use a negative position for a footer on some of my sites as I have found no other way of getting to appear where I want - it's not that I'm trying to hide anything.