Does having landing page text beneath the products at the base of the page hinder SEO?

[Silkstream]

I have a site that is capable of hosting the landing page description either above the products under the H1 or below them at the bottom of the page before the footer. I have always chosen to keep the text "above the fold" as presumably this would be crawled sooner in relation to the rest of the page content than had it been at the bottom. However, this means that I can only really write just a few sentences for each landing page - otherwise the products would shift further down the page - and I don't think this is good from a UX POV.

Question: If I move the bulk of my landing page descriptions to the text snippet located underneath the products, could this negatively affect my SEO? Text at the bottom of the page is obviously not significant for users, so is there a chance this could be seen as spam?

[Kingof5]

I don't think it would directly have a negative impact on your SEO. Could it be seen as spammy, like it's just there for robots and not users, if a manual reviewer checked it out? It's possible. My personal preference is text at the top of the page, and a few sentences should be enough.

[AlanMosley]

Google had a update sometime ago, to look at content above the fold. I think the idea was that many sites at the time were attacking hits with content below the fold and had only adds above the fold. so yes, you should have content above the fold. At least it is worth more.

[0102345]

my agency uses a line of code that allows google crawl the text below products as if it were at the top of the page. if you have an in-house programmer, i would get them to write you a script that performs the same function. there is no way for there to always be text above the fold- we have one client who demands all text at the bottom of their website so this code is particularly important for them.

[Silkstream]

Hey Karen, yeah I checked with the developer who laughed at the "line of code" but said yeah its something we could look into doing. Although I may not need to now as Panda 4.0 seems to have done the site a massive favour this morning