Layers (Div tags or similar) to shift keyword rich text

Apparent repositioning of keyword rich text

[kdawber]

I note that Dreamweaver MX, by default, codes what it calls 'layers' by shifting the position of the content within the layer to occur directly after the BODY tag with this content being contained within DIV tags. Although it is coded at the beginning of the HTML, the display of the layer may be anywhere in the page including being at the very bottom.

If the content within this layer was keyword rich text (including keyword rich text within H1 tags etc) would this not get most search engines to look at these keywords with greater importance as these occurred near to the top of the page?

Has anyone tested this out with any of the search engines?

Given that this is the default action of Dreamweaver MX, which a massive proportion of the internet is coded with, am I safe in assuming that the search engines will not be penalising me for attempting to do this? Do any other html editors also do this?

Please note, I am not talking about using any ‘hidden layers’. Just using the html repositioning of the layer content within the html stream to give greater weight to the important keyword rich text.

To some degree, this could be considered a way to fix a problem with search engine spiders in that they see text in a different order to the way the final user sees it. For example, text near the top of the page may be considered in the middle or bottom of the page because the spider has seen all the text on the left hand side first. These layers give the web page author the capability to decide which part of the page’s content that the spider sees first.

Is there agreement on this being a safe technique to help with Search Engine Optimisation?

[OddDog]

Yes the early a bot gets to the content, the more importance it recieves.