Question

I have a very large navigation bar on my website and I was given the advise of placing it (html) after my content to generate better SEO.

How effective is this method?

Answer 1

What you need to realise is that SEO is nothing more than a silly marketing term used by companies that have had the luck to work with big companies like Coca Cola and News Corp that attribute their successful brands to this magic thing called SEO. SEO is nothing more than a mixture of “writing websites as you’re supposed to” and “trying to trick Google”. All SEO really should be is writing semantically correct web pages with clear content that users will enjoy.

Google really doesn’t care if your navigation is before or after your content, and neither should you. If the content is displayed correctly and users can see it as text then it’s safe to assume that Google, with their immensely-qualified legions of engineers and developers will be able to find it. Even if it did matter the difference would be so insignificant that it wouldn’t even register in any ranking algorithm.

I hate to be obtuse about this, but please don’t concern yourself with such problems, just make your website as nice for users as you can.

EDIT: As requested I’ll explain my beliefs, which stem mainly from experience in both SEO and from writing semantic and contextual web crawlers.

The only area where the order of div’s will matter to a search engine is when the size of a page is larger than a fixed amount (let’s say, 100kb) or when a crawler is unable to crawl a page correctly. It’s not uncommon for someone to put content at the top and then reorder using CSS, but should someone do that then if the crawler fails to crawl the entire page due to some error or quick link-scanning (something Yahoo has been known to do) then your content will be crawled, but the rest of your links may miss out. If I’ve learned anything from writing crawlers it’s that I’m 99% certain that the Google crawler will not crawl a page fully on its first go.

Also, it’s bad practice for users to have things like navigation at the bottom. Remember that many of us are still stuck on dialup or have poor-quality connections. If your navigation doesn’t load because it’s at the bottom of the page then your user won’t be moving onwards throughout your site.

Search engines in their very nature will only parse a limited amount of content before it stops, because it has registered it as the relevant information on a web page. As such, logically speaking your links are by far the most important aspect of SEO, not only by making sure your full site content is accessible but through link value. After all, we’re dealing with SEO and SEO in itself is bastardised link-building for pretend users.

In short, Google does not rank code, it ranks content. As a result it really doesn’t care where your content is. Even if it did, would something as simple as its placement really matter enough to benefit you? Also, the only concrete fact you’ll get in SEO is from Google. People like Matt Cutts (the Google search spam guy) are probably the best people outside to look at, but remember that they’ve also got their own agendas to push. SEO is no better than Homeopathy; a bunch of people claim something works so other people do it, some see some form of result and some get absolutely nothing. There’s no logical proof for it to work, but it’s still used as if it is a cure.

EDIT 2: To reiterate my belief that navigation is far more important than content here’s my take on the subject.

It’s often said that content is king, but that content means nothing if it is not found, given a value and stored in Google’s index for a set amount of time. Google does not rank websites as such, it ranks separate web pages and it passes this link value onwards. Logically speaking, the most important thing to do is to make sure that Google finds out about your pages and any changes made in them as soon as possible to factor into its algorithm. This way, users find out about your page and the Google crawlers can work out the frequency in which your page has link value recalculated towards it.

It really wouldn’t surprise me if Google didn’t crawl whole pages at a time, and simply broke them up on how the page is semantically viewed. This could mean that no part of a page is ignored, but the likelihood of its billion-strong index being full of complete and up-to-date information is highly unlikely.

The harsh reality is that content and markup mean far less to Google than good internal linking, link value and external actions. It’s why you see loads of old, crappy pages on generic searches and why horrible link farms are able to get such high rankings on Google for such a short time, even when their websites are terrible. Such changes will mean next to nothing to Google and in that time you could easily gain at least another link through outside promotion.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask.