css issue: footer div at top of markup

[deepsand]

In terms of SEO - and it is as much art as it is science - my belief is that the order of content on a page is important. Much like a news report, with the 'biggest' headline and story of the day always coming first.

Were the indexing engines capable of true sematical analysis, such an argument might be more easily made. In fact, were that the case, they may very well determine that your lead text was a "misplaced" footer, and discount its value.

However, since they are currently not so, to hold that they construe order to be indicative of import seems, in the absence of empirical evidence, to be speculative at best.

Notice also in search results themselves - the descriptive line under the main link often includes eg. email addresses, telephone numbers, dates, odd wording etc. Click thru and you'll usually find this content top of page (when, to encourage click thru, a proper description may / probably would work better).

And, quite often one will find that to not be the case. But, to the extent that such holds, does that really say anything about "importance" - note your mention of "odd wording" - or of simple rote positional copying?

[tomcatuk]

I'd think twice before trying something like this. It's fairly obvious it's an attempt to display a page differently to a bot than to a human - and they don't like that much!