HI, I have been experimenting with my website. I used a page that had already a bad position ( page 20 ). Here is what I did. Our website has 3 columns ( sidebar left, main content, sidebar right ). The left hand sidebar has a lot of text and a form. So what I did was turned the html code around that the content area is coming first and then the left hand sidebar and via css still displaying them in the usual way. When I checked today the page dropped to page 47 :S All we did was changing the layout and reworded the title and h1 tag slightly. Now my question is what order is better sidebar content sidebar or content sidebar sidebar
Optimize your page for SEO best practices then do off-page work like social bookmarking and search engine submission.
Results are most likely to fluctuate if you make any small change on the page. Order doesn't matter, you just need to focus on getting quality backlinks to the page and wait for +ve results.
Thats why, on-page optimization is very important today, most of the ranking position you would get from your on-page optimization and if you are in less competitive niche then you may not have to work for off-page optimization as well.
Firstly try to practice SEO rules correctly. You may have to take knowledge about HTML edition. Your page order is not a major fact here. Try to focus on backlink building.
These types of changes themselves will make little difference- focus on the type of content you're populating these areas with instead. To clarify on your original point, you're likely experiencing 'Google Dance' which is where subtle changes both on-site or off-site can make your rankings fluctuate for a period of 1-3 weeks. Just because your rankings have been effected positively or negatively right now; doesn't mean the change hasn't had the desired effect. Wait for several weeks after making on-page changes to get a true representative of your SERPS. WebDev
For the Navigation, SEO experts says that it should on top, left and at the bottom of the page. Other than this, there is more factors which are very much important from SEO point of view like heading tags, bold text, anchor text, optimized image, alt and title tag of image, Meta tags, page title, page weight and of course look.
Google never crawls whole page completely it crawls some % of page and its spider crawls new webpage, fresh content faster so when you modified the code crawler detected some updation on your website and crawled it and that updation did n't meet google quality guidelines. This would be the most possible reason behind this drop.