Menu links in the left hand column may be hurting ranking?

[onami]

In WebPosition Page Critic:

"Your page uses one or more tables. If you have your menu links in the left
hand column of your page (i.e., the first cell of a multi-column table), then you may be hurting your ranking."

Why?

[WindSun]

That statement makes no sense to me at all.

[curlykarl]

When I tried WPG it gave me the same message, it is now in the bin where it belongs :)

IMHO

[hetzeld]

Hi Onami, and welcome to WebMasterWorld,

This could make sense as it puts your content a bit further down in your page. Most search engines give a higher importance to the text located in the beginning of the page and, whith your table, that's where your navbar is.

Not sure this has an important impact on your ranking, though.

Dan

[cwebb]

Because then the whole navigation would be read first by a visiting spider and SE's put a little more weight on text/headings that come early in the html body.

There's a simple way to put your content first despite using tables, simply insert another row at the top which is empty but the middle column (the one with the content below) is merged with the content and thus the content appears first in the html code

(I know I'm bad at explaining things like that but I hope you know html and get the basic idea)

[creative craig]

Googlebot reads the first thing it comes to on the page.

So if you use tables and you have text links on the left hand side of the page and some one searchs for your site, the text links will come up as the description for your site.

Hope that makes sense :)

Craig

[Visit Thailand]

I understand this. What it is talking about is how an engine may see all the links first then the main page text later.

If you have a lot of links etc then I think ranking in SERPS may be slightly affected but I doubt by much.

[heini]

Onami, welcome to the board.
In fact that statement pertains to the idea that content, especially headers, should be as high in the code of a page as possible. A spider reading a page with a lefthand column containing navigation would usually read that first, before the content in the second column.
So, there's something to it.

Look here for a solution:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[digitalghost]

The WPG critic is referring to tables pushing your body content down the page. 30 links on a LH nav shoves content way down in the scheme of things.

Some SEOs prefer divs for that reason.

Tables definitely affect the order in which bots snag the content and in turn can mess with keyword proximity.

<edit>Now there's a quick consensus</edit>

[garry]

WoW! I'm about to modify a page or two that are slow (but customer likes them as is).

By using the transp gif in top LHS column, will this also then lead to my content loading quicker? , rather than my dhtml menu (as include page)(on LHS) slowing the process?

Either way, if O can get my content read earlier it is a bonus!

[instand1]

Don't you put your most important keywords in the link-text of your (left hand) menue?
By doing so, the important content comes first anyway