hi, spiders work by going the top down approach right? if so, if the beginning of your page is duplicated like toolbars etc...and your new content is always towards the midle and end, that is no good right? new content should always be placed near the top?
the navigation etc (called boilerplate) is stripped away as google sees it is sitewide. google reads the entire page (doesnt read a little and moves on as many people think) so dont worry about it bro. If the content is in the body youre good.
Hello, Be sure to have more content than your nav bar, sometime your page could become as duplicate content becouse your nav bar is bigger than your content My 2 cents, Jakomo
hi thanks for the replies....how about posts? post titles in h1 tag if good for seo, but is it necessary to have a breif description? the reason is because i am building a site, but would like to but more newer posts on the front page....but adding a description of each post kind of takes up valuable homepage realestate.
Blackstonemedia, you just won the award for the best advice given on this thread so far. To answer the origianl poster's question, yes a search engine spider will read the page from top to bottom (with regard to the order of the source code). Most of the so-called "issues" that arise with this really are non-issues and really have more to do with accessibility and usability than SEO (which despite what the crackpots, frauds, naysayers, nutjobs and scammers will say, actually BENEFITS on-site SEO efforts since the search engine spider will be able to find and index all those pages in your site, even if it can't index everything on them, in which case a serious study at the code and content architechture of each page needs to be re-examined). I'm sure you've heard about the "content first for SEO" approach, but rest assured it's just a steaming pile of cow manure. Your page's content will be indexed regardless, and if you use sound development best practices (such as the ones I outlined in my "All You Need to Know About SEO" thread - see my signature for the link) it will be a non-issue. Oh, and as far as the headings are concerned, H1 is for the page title. See the thread I referred to earlier for more information on how to use them properly.
Unfortunately that's just not true. The pages won't be viewed as having duplicate content, since menus and other structural elements are not content (the stuff you read). However, you did hit the nail on the head, but for the wrong reason. Content is king - if you don't have a lot of content on the page, then reconsider whether having a separate page for it is essential (chances are you either don't have enough quality relevant content on the page, or the content in question can be incorporated into another page).
If you don't use description tags Google will use the first text on the page and that is often the menu or some other text that appears on every page which can result in duplicate content. It will have the same effect as if you had put the same description on every page.
My thread may be a help if you are very new to SEO. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=346458