Source Ordered Content - SOC in SEO

Question

How much does source ordered content affect SEO optimization and ranking? Do spiders crawl SOC in an easier way? Typical html web page comprises elements in following order:

1. header
2. content
3. sidebar
4. footer

(Content and sidebar exchange often in order)

However source ordered content is a technique where the law is to place content and position elements to display elements in different order:

1. content
2. sidebar
3. header
4. footer

Do advantages of SOC design outweight common placement of elements in a non SOC design?

Do SOC pages rank higher? I coded source ordered design, but I would like more experienced web designers to contribute and help me with SOC/non SOC dilemma.

Thanks

Answer 1

Google doesn’t mention it in their Webmaster guidelines.

Answer 2

I have no definately reliable references to prove it, but I can tell you that its common practice a definately considered important issue in professional SEO. I once saw an article with direct comparision of content which proved that SOC websites performed better on content matching. However you gotta ask yourself the question if you really want to have the content higher rated than the header. Most websites have important keywords in it and google can easily determine sitelinks to display inline in search results which is very neat and has good clickrates. where SOC is definately a big issue ist for accessibility (speech browsers).