Content as high up the source code as possible, does this still apply?

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Content as high up the source code as possible, does this still apply?

Mark_A

10:08 am on Jun 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

It used to be said that content should be as high up the page source code as possible. So javascript menus for example, which took up a lot of code lines, were frowned upon.

Is the mantra still content as high as possible?

Because I note:

1) pages doing ok in the serps with quite a bit of code above the contents.

2) that google certainly does read all of the page, because that is what it stores in its cache.

3) Might google itself value data at the top of the page more?

4) I have not seen many examples of the blank table cell in use today.

Mark_A

3:21 pm on Jun 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

I am just trying to specify a new website.

I just wrote, no javascript and no popup menus at least unless a blank cell is used.

Should I specify that?

tedster

3:28 pm on Jun 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

It's not the big deal that it used to be - with Google anyway - but it does help page load speed to keep javascript at the end of the source code, and content near or at the top of the <body>.

I'd forget about the table cell trick. And there's nothing technically wrong with hover menus if they can be crawled - and that's not hard to achieve.

Mark_A

3:52 pm on Jun 18, 2010 (gmt 0)

Hi tedster,

Yes, it does seem less important now, I do see quite a lot of code in the top of pages quite often high up the serps.

Re forgetting about the table cell trick, but I like it so much, I can still remember how I found out about it and the first time I used it.

Planet13

8:23 pm on Jun 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

4) I have not seen many examples of the blank table cell in use today.

could someone explain what the blank table cell trick is?

Thanks in advance.

mirrornl

8:49 pm on Jun 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

do a search for it...

Search engine friendly HTML table cell order

tedster

8:50 pm on Jun 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

See How to get main text "before" other body html [webmasterworld.com] - a discussion from 2001.

Planet13

9:47 pm on Jun 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

I'd forget about the table cell trick.

In your opinion, is the blank table cell trick considered spam then?

I have dozens of html pages are set up like this:


<table>
 <tr>
 <td>&nbsp;</td>
 <td rowspan=2>Main content of page here</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Category Tree Goes Here</td>
 </tr>
</table>

Should I change those and remove the table cell with the non breaking space?

Thanks in advance.

tedster

3:43 am on Jun 20, 2010 (gmt 0)

No, it's not spam. It's just without real usefulness now. It was an effective way to work around a limitation of early, relative stupid search engines algorithms. But that limitation is no longer there as I see it. Today's algorithms (and not just Google's) do visual page simulation and page segmentation, so they know where the page's content is, no matter where it appears in the source code.