Source-ordered code

Does Google still care?

[Tonearm]

Does anyone know if Google still favors source-ordered code? I put my source-ordered design together years ago with absolute positioning, and I wonder if it's still useful as far as SE rankings.

[tedster]

The last time I made such a change (about 6 months back) it still seemed to have a helpful effect in rankings. This was a case where the layout required quite a lot of "other stuff" preceding the meat when they just use a basic "static position" flow for the source code.

I do think the Google algos are getting better at picking out the essential content - but they do still miss at times, too. You still see the occasional snippet that just shows the menu items when the search terms does exist on the page in the body copy.

It is possible that all you need to help the Google algo today is clear semantic mark-up -- with all the text in a well defined container element -- and that changing source order in addition to having that kind of semantic clarity is not needed or helpful any more.

I'm about to help a website switch to source ordered content - and they are already ranking rather well, but not all that well if you know what I mean. Their source code is pretty well structured from a semantic sense, but there's still a big block of assorted code before you get to the real topic of any page.

I will report back on how the change seems to affect ranking once this project is complete. Because it's a pretty big corporate site, things will not move as fast on this project as an entrepeneur's site would - so don't expect my report next week ;)

[Kneek]

I'd be very interested if other members have some thoughts on this. I always design websites using source-ordered code, but haven't done any tests..