I can't stop wondering if search engines give any prefrence to websites which have their page's actual content right after the body tag in html. Does it matter if your using header and footer which are same for most of your website. and google deems it like duplicate content or something.
I know it is advantageous to have your body text near the top of the code so it is easy to spider. If the spider needs to wade through a bunch of other things like javascript etc before hitting anything of substance it might leave prematurely. As for dup content, as long as your header and footer are not paragraphs long, you don't have anything to worry about. The algo is smart enough to figure out that the content itself isn't dup. Make sense? Hope it helps
Yeah you won't get penalized for duplicate content just for using the same header, footer or navigation menu. That would leave at least half the websites online penalized. I have read that it helps to have your keywords as close to the opening body tag as possible. I doubt it gives you much advantage to do this, but sometimes you need all the help you can get. To deal with this issue you might want to consider using a css layout instead of tables. That way you can put your divs in whatever order you think it best and then specify their positions in the page.