I want to place a primarily decorative header on top of my rendered page but I would put the code lower in the HTML and position higher using CSS. My limited research suggests that the only thing involving CSS I should avoid is using display:hidden. Is there any consensus on whether or not this type of CSS placement manipulation hurts SEO?
I don't believe so, not sure if this is right but search engines don't read CSS i think they only read the HTML. Now I THINK they do i don't know for sure.
If the display:hidden tag is a problem I would have to believe that they do scan CSS. I'm just wondering if Google frowns on content being displayed at the top of a page due to CSS positioning when the actual code appears at the bottom of the HTML.
But what i am saying is if your html is in order it shouldn't matter what CSS you have in it. CSS is just to style your site and it SHOULDN"T have effect on SEO. Thats just my two cents you can wait for more people to jump in cause i am interested just as much as you. what are you hiding anyway?
Sorry you may be right IF google accounts for CSS when crawling then yes it most likely would IF google doesn't craw the CSS then it shouldn't matter as long as the HTML is correct The real question you should ask is what does google read when on your website
Search engines don't look at presentation (CSS) they look at content, so they see your HTML, as it sits in the file. You can position it anywhere you like, but the search engine sees it the way it is, not the way it's positioned.
No you shouldn't be worried about it since search engine bots only read html yes but one thing you should keep in mind if you are putting an image as a background then must define its description in alt tag in html.
Google do not read css..Bots are designed to parse html codes only. And display:hidden is also not something that Google will consider. The factor which needs to be considered here is the page load speed. You must compress all your images so that it will not increase the page load speed.