Could our side menu be viewed as footer links and penalized?

[Bewenched]

When we designed our pages originally it was the basic design within tables

header
menu
content
footer

We found that a few of the search engines were showing our menu content as the snippet (which looked terrible) so we put the menu as a div that loads to the left of the content, but the coding for it is actually further down the code from the content.

This was not necessarily for SEO reasons, but seeing a listing of
widgets looked terrible.

This made our snippets look much better in the results, however now i'm wondering if google is seeing these as footer links because they are below the content?

Any thoughts.

[tedster]

I use this kind of "source ordered content" a lot and have never seen any ranking problem on those sites.

I don't know the exact technology that Google uses to analyze the various "blocks" on a page, but even if there were some kind of bug in that algo that decided this was a set of footer links, there is no prohibition on all footer links. There is especially no prohibition of internal menu links in the footer, which can be very helpful for visitors.

Now, deceptive footer links, paid footer links, excessive cross-linking in footer links etc - that can cause troubles.