There is a whole lot of writing on a number of sites about the importance of have the content of the site come before other parts – such as sidebars with navigation and ads and the like – for reasons having to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The argument is that the bots indexing sites will rank the content higher and more correctly if they meet the content before they see all the other, relatively unimportant stuff on a given page.
I do not believe this argument. I think it is a myth. I even think it is a myth that is being promoted and repeated over and over by a certain group of people because it serves their collective interests.
First, the people from search engine companies that have produced programs for indexing web pages are obviously not stupid. I am quite sure they have written programs that distinguish between navigational elements, ads and content, and that correctly classify these elements regardless of where they appear. Do you really believe that Google is willing to wrongly classify the millions of pages people have posted where the content comes at the end or towards the end of the source code file? Well, I don’t. After all, this was how every page looked not many years ago!
Secondly, content is usually served using different types of elements than ads and navigational elements. For instance, most often we use h1, h2, h3 (headlines) as headers and p (paragraph-elements) for most of the content. So there are certain syntax clues usually that allows spiders and bots to identify content – that’s why semantic HTML makes sense and it important. Furthermore – content is usually recognizable words that appear between tags. So identifying content is not very hard, and I am confident that the search companies have it pretty well figured out.
Third, I have never seen any hard evidence that content first matters for SEO. Which is pretty strange, if it is as important as the people promoting this myth seem to mean.
Fourth, the people that promote the idea that content must come first for SEO purposes are CSS experts. And as they also maintain that the only way to achieve this is by having a CSS-based site layout (this argument is false – there exist easy to implement table-hacks that achieve the same with respect to column order) , this argument also serves to increase the demand for the services of this group of web designers and specialists. So it could and perhaps should be viewed as a self-serving argument or a self-serving myth. And that, I think, is how I view it.
I will also add that if you take a look at the source code for some of the really popular blogs out there – blogs that are high up on the first page of search results, you will, as I do, immediately see that content does not come first. In many cases far from it, actually. So this is a myth we really should get rid of as soon as possible.
