Hi,

I have been using Zen up to now, but changed for Fusion on several sites now that the latter is evolving so promisingly and rapidly.

One nagging question though. Zen has a nice feature in the sense that it loads content before it loads side bars. This is very good for SEO, since search engines index the main content rather than "side" information as navigation, links, etc.

It seems to me Fusion does not feature this, but perhaps it has other solutions to the content-first indexing issue? Could you please comment or point to resources that clarify this?

Thanks!

Comments

stephthegeek’s picture

stephthegeek commented
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Actually, content-first is a bit of a red herring in the SEO world. We did a LOT of research on this before deciding on what we ended up with. Probably the highest research-to-code for anything in Fusion :) There really are no confirmed statistics that content first has any substantial benefit, especially if you have things like a skip link, well-structured markup (i.e. headers and such), and are using meta descriptions. Search engines are not stupid. They know what's a menu and what's content. If you dig into the topic, you'll see a lot of random SEO proponents and bloggers saying "yeah, that's good for SEO" without any actual evidence or verified expert opinions.

Implementing the layout this way would complicate it even more, which makes for a lot of support issues (just see how many people have trouble modifying the sidebar layout/widths in Zen), and a higher bar to modify an already complex theme.

After weighing things carefully, we decided it wasn't worth the negligible-if-any SEO benefit to do crazy CSS things to put the content first.

That being said, Fusion's layout engine is getting a bit of an upgrade in D7 and it will make it at least *possible* to do this down the road if people want to. But it's not something we ourselves are going to implement and support, unless something in the SEO world changes and more evidence comes to light.

Good question, thanks :)

vacilando’s picture

vacilando commented

@stephthegeek, thank you for this interesting and exhaustive (for the time being, anyway!) answer. I am glad you guys have examined the issue so thoroughly, and I hope that if in the future more hard evidence comes up in favour of content-first approach, Fusion will have as much energy to adapt and evolve as it has now.

vacilando’s picture

vacilando commented
Issue tags: +CSS, +zen, +SEO, +sidebar, +Fusion, +content-first