Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I did some searching on this forum and elsewhere trying to determine if the order of content within a page's HTML matters to Google (or other search engines for that matter). Is there more value/relevance placed on content near the beginning of the HTML than the stuff near the bottom of the page?
I ask because I have a 3-column site currently built using tables that has a long laundry-list type navigation menu that runs down the left side of the page and appears very early in the HTML. I'm working on a redesign and am considering positioning the menu using CSS but having the menu be the last thing rendered in the HTML. The idea is that the more "valuable" content appears much sooner in the page.
Any thoughts on this and how it might impact how Google processes the page? I'm sure this is not a new concept and someone out there has tested the theory out a bit.
If your pages are ranking well but you believe they could rank better, I would adopt a careful step by step process, perhaps beginning with moving over to a CSS based layout - without at first altering the order of the content in the source code - and then a few pages (or one section) at a time, move to where you want to be.
In terms of satisfying Google's perception of quality, it may also be advantageous to break down a long laundry list navigation bar into smaller ones on a section by section approach.
I do agree that the SEs have gotten better at identifying the real content of the page and separating it from the navigation for ranking purposes, no matter where it lives on the page, so the benefits of this technique may have lessened over time.
I would be very cautious with this. Google is apparently able to separate blocks of content from navigation blocks and to treat them accordingly. And if you alter the whole of your site's architecture at a sweep, you may get unexpected (negative) ranking effects for a while.
This may be true but I have redesigned several website, moving them from table based layouts to CSS with radical changes in the order of the content and I have never suffered any penalty as a result.
The sites that are doing well are cloaking. They are using one huge image to represent their entire left navigation and search box (sans imagemap links or form submit functionality) when the user agent is Googlebot. The page looks identical in Google's cache as it does on their live site even though the navigation and search boxes don't work. This cuts down the size of the HTML page by a huge amount. I figured Google would be smart enough by now to detect this kind of thing when there's 15k difference in HTML source when the user agent string changes from Googlebot to a browser-like string.
One of the sites that is doing this has enjoyed a steady gain in their Alexa traffic rank since early December. (I know, Alexa isn't definitive but it's a half-decent relative comparison tool.) They've gone from around 1000 to ~600 during which time they appear to be dominating the Google SERPs on tens of thousands of terms within our product category.
But I do intend to play with CSS positioning to move my menu to the bottom of the source and slowly roll it out to see what happens.
