Risks and rewards of positioning content with CSS
-
Some SEO folks (such as http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/css-and-seo.shtml) advocate using CSS so that unique content in the body of your page appears earlier in the file than non-unique content (such as, for example, the content of an elaborate drop-down menu system).
What say you? Do search engines now disregard position on page, and look at your pages holistically?
-
This used to be best practice... but I suspect the technique has lost most of it's usefulness.
The reason is that Google can now render CSS - and has been able to for some time. It's also better at context analysis - meaning it knows and understands sidebar content vs. footer content vs. editorial content.
What is important is how much of your content is above the fold and prominently displayed to users.
PRO tip: Enter your URL into the Browser Size tool from Google to see how visitors see your page.
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
If you find that you have too much non-essential content in your code that over-whelms your more important, unique content (such as the elaborate drop-down menu you describe) - folks often see improvements in rankings by trimming down their navigation and reducing their template footprint. Something to consider.
Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Search engine spiders still read websites from the top down, as far as I know. Have not heard of any recent changes to the contrary.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Who gets punished for duplicate content?
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
Technical SEO | | Tobii-Dynavox0 -
174 Duplicate Content Errors
How do I go about fixing these errors? There are all related to my tags. Thank you in advance for any help! Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisarein0 -
Adding content into an iframe
I want to buy an app/program that will help me create unique content but the content will be inserted to the page via an iframe. I have heard that iframes are problematic. I know that there will not be a lot of indexable content from this but I think that it will make people want to link to me. I would like to hear from someone's experience if I should go ahead or not.
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
Remotely Loaded Content
Hi Folks, I have a two part question. I'd like to add a feature to our website where people can click on an ingredient (we manufacture skin care products) and a tool-tip style box pops up and describes information about the ingredient. Because many products share some of the same ingredients, I'm going to load this data from a source file via AJAX. My questions are: Does this type of remotely-fetched content have any effect on how a search engines views and indexes the page? Can it help contribute to the page's search engine ranking? If there are multiple pages fetching the same piece of remotely-fetched content, will this be seen as duplicated content? Thanks! Hal
Technical SEO | | AlabuSkinCare0 -
Does page size and relative content position affect SEO?
Good morning, Each product page of our e-commerce site consists of a fairly lengthy header and footer. The former of which contains links to ~60 product categories, the logo, etc, while the latter contains information such as the latest posts from our blog, links to support, etc. The main "content" of the page is of course product related information, which also happens to contain a bit of templated data such as links which when clicked open respective sliders containing information regarding our return and shipping policies. The question: We wonder whether the relative "size" of the page has anything to do with SEO results. As an example, suppose the page header consists of 20% of the total page size, the important page-specific content consumes 60%, and the footer consumes the final 20%. Is this relevant? Or to rephrase the question: Should we be concerned about keeping our headers and footers as small as possible? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | FondriestEnv0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Adding more content to an old site
We have a site which was de-moted from PR4 to PR3 with the latest Google update. We have not done any SEO for a long time for the site and the content is the same with over 100 page. My question is, in order to update the site, which is the best to do it, do we: 1. re-introduced new content to replace old once 2. re-write old content 3. Add new pages Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | seomagnet0 -
Panda Update Question - Syndicated Content Vs Copied Content
Hi all, I have a question on copied content and syndicated content - Obviously copying content directly form another website is a big no no, but wanted to know how Google views syndicated content and if it views this differently? If you have syndicated content on your website, can you penalised from the lastest Panda update and is there a viable solutiion to address this? Mnay thanks Simon
Technical SEO | | simonsw0