Putting nav code at the bottom of a page?

[Fubra]

Hey,

We are doing a re-design on our websites and we have run into a little problem.

Basically we need to put the nav code at the bottom of the page (so when you view source all the nav code it at the bottom) but the nav will of course still show at the top.

Will this cause any issues with our SEO? Will it make the nav seem less important or get crawled less?

Thanks for the help in advance!

Ricky

[RyanKent]

Placing the navigation code at the bottom of your HTML is preferable from a SEO perspective.

I have never heard of any system that "had" to place the nav code at the bottom. I've always had to specifically request the nav code be moved to the bottom of the page. I am curious. What software are you working with that requires the code placed at the bottom?

Presently crawlers read your site's HTML code from top to bottom. By placing your nav code at the bottom you can associate anchor text with your content links rather then your navigation links, which is generally preferable. This reasoning is why I position the nav code at the bottom of the html code.

In the future that may change with HTML and other semantic markup offering the ability for crawlers to easily identify content, but for now your approach is preferable in my experience.

[carralon]

Hi Ricky, how big is this site... I have done this 3 years ago on a site I manage of about 100 pages. It worked fine from the first day. My main drive for this though was: I had one horizontal nav on top with no value links which the client insisted in having plus the beefy left hand vertical nav with the right keywords in. In the code I displaced the top horizontal nav to the bottom as and kept the left hand side vertical navigation on the top (codewise). It works wonderfully and no issues with Google at all.

cheers

david

[EGOL]

I think that google is smart enough to tell nav code from content.

Most people who do this are probably wasting their time.

I put the nav code at the top... it contains some of my most important links.

Think about it.... If you think that Google can't identify nav code then this is like putting the links to your most important category pages in the footer.  Do you really want to do that?

[Alex-Harford]

I see the value of associating anchor text with content links rather than navigation, but I agree with EGOL more than Ryan on this one. What if users are viewing the site with CSS disabled? Maybe because it's easier to view with a screen reader for blind/partially sighted people - it's not very user-friendly having the main navigation links only at the bottom is it?

[bloggidy]

I have placed the nav code at the bottom of the HTML doc at times. I can't really say that it is a significant difference for SEO. It doesn't take a lot of work to do if you are skilled with HTML/CSS but I can't really say that this methodology will have a long term benefit for SEO.

HTML 5 has new tags that sites should adopt such as

<nav>and other tags to indicate what that chunk of content is. These tags are supported by all major browsers at this point. I don't know all the specific browser versions. I would recommend this moving forward where possible. By using this tags the crawlers likely will not factor in position in the document to understand the importance of chunks of content.</nav>