Moving Content on the page with JS / CSS

Is it a legitimate tactic

[irldonalb]

Hi

At a conference last week, a speaker on a panel about Content Generation said it was perfectly fine to move content further down the page using CSS / JavaScript.

Personally I think this is one step better than hidden content.

I was wondering the anyone had an opinion on this?

Thanks
Donal

[yandr]

I am not sure what you mean by moving content further down, but it certainly an acceptable practice using CSS. I am not sure I would try something like that using javascript though SEO is not my main concern there.

[irldonalb]

Sorry if I didn't explain this correctly. The idea is that the content is appearing high in the source code.

However when a browser loads the page, this content appears in the footer. This shift is done using CS or JS. Note sure which.

[Alex_TJ]

It's called Source Ordered Code - SOC.
Works great, especially when you have 3rd party widgets high up in the page, that you can have loading last through CSS positioning so your content shows more quickly.
All above board,
Alex

[ergophobe]

Actually, I'm thinking of doing something like this for the simple reason mentioned by Alex_TJ: I serve up ads such as Adsense and these often take forever to load and can block the content from loading. So I'm thinking of putting my ad blocks way down below the footer in the source code and then using some CSS positioning to bring them back up where they belong.

This means that the content loads fast and doesn't get blocked while waiting for ads to serve up.

In this case, the only complaint I could imagine from Google is that they lose out on my minuscule revenue when their ad server bogs down. My users, however, have a *better* not worse experience.