Higher is Better

Since this book was first published in 2006, I have been testing
various optimization methods. After extensive testing I have
discovered that left vertical navigation hinders search engine spiders
and dilutes search result ranking. As a test I used a group of 500
websites, all of which are identical in layout, and each has unique
content. In the test I split the sites into two groups of 250 sites each.
One was the control group and the other were my test group. On the
test group I removed the left vertical navigation and added fresh
content. On the test group all I only added fresh content. By adding
fresh content I triggered the search spiders to re-index all 500
websites. Within a week I saw a substantial gain on the websites that
I had removed the left vertical page navigation. The control group
remained vertically as it had before I had begun the tests.
The left vertical page navigation is rendered before the content of the
page itself, and in my testing either hindered spiders from indexing or
diluted the pages content to such a point that the search engines
would not rank the content very well at all.
In addition I placed vertical navigation on the right side of the page
and content and again the search results and referrals fared much
better than pages with left navigation on them. By placing the vertical
navigation on the right of the page and content that area is render last
or after the main page content, which of course doesn’t hinder the
search spiders from properly indexing the page content.
The results are quite remarkable simply by removing everything
before the page content. It goes to show that the content is more
valuable than any other optimization technique.