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
-
Old Content after 301 Redirect Success
Hi, I want to ask what need I do to the old content after my 301 redirect to the new domain with the same content success? Do I need to remove that old content? Nothing bad happen right? Thanks
Technical SEO | | matthewparkman0 -
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
Recurring events and duplicate content
Does anyone have tips on how to work in an event system to avoid duplicate content in regards to recurring events? How do I best utilize on-page optimization?
Technical SEO | | megan.helmer0 -
Sitemap For Static Content And Blog
We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site. We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year). But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently. How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed. I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones? I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
How different should content be so that it is not considered duplicate?
I am making a 2nd website for the same company. The name of the company, our services, keywords and contact info will show up several times within the text of both websites. The overall text and paragraphs will be different but some info may be repeated on both sites. Should I continue this? What precautions should I take?
Technical SEO | | savva0 -
How to resolve this Duplicate content?
Hi , There is page i get when i do proper menu navigation Caratlane.com>jewellery>rings>casualsrings> http://www.caratlane.com/jewellery/rings/casual-rings/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html When i do a site search in my search box by my product code number "JR00219" The same page is appears with different url http://www.caratlane.com/leaves-dew-diamond-0-03-ct-peridot-1-ct-ring-18k-yellow-gold.html So there is a duplicate content. How can we resolve it. Regards, kathir caratlane.com
Technical SEO | | kathiravan0 -
URL content format - Any impact on SEO
I understand that there is a suggested maximum length for a URL so as not to be penalized by search engines. I'm wondering if I should if should optimize our ecommerce categories to be descriptive or use abbreviations to help keep the URL length to a minimum? Our products are segmented into many categories, so many products URL's are pretty long if we go the descriptive route. I've also heard that removing the category component entirely from a product URL can also be considered. I'm fairly new to all this SEO stuff, so I'm hoping the community can share their knowledge on the impact of these options. Cheers, Steve
Technical SEO | | SteveMaguire0 -
If I 301 re-direct a piece of content (A) to another piece of content (B) and B is unrelated in subject matter to A, will the referring search keywords to content piece A hold for content piece B?
For example, I have a piece of content about furniture and it ranks in top 5 in the SERPs for the phrase "furniture". If I were to 301 redirect that piece of furniture content to a piece of content about trucks, would the referring keyword "furniture" continue to rank over time for the trucks content? My instincts tell me that in the short term the content piece about trucks would receive traffic for the term "furniture", but over the long term, the trucks content would lose rankings for the term "furniture" since the piece has to do with trucks and not furniture. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | pbrothers240