Risks and rewards of positioning content with CSS

[ahirai]

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?

[TakeshiYoung]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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!