H tag precedence from a search engine perspective?

I had someone suggest to me that since a left sidebar title in an H3 tag shows up before a title in an H1 tag in the main content area of a webpage, that a search engine will not recognize it, due to an expectation that an H1 tag should show up first.

Has anyone got any perspective on this that they can share or point me to? Perhaps I’ve missed something in the exchange with this person.

Matt

First off, the left side doesn’t need to show up first. Using floats properly you can always place the content before any other column. Other than that, tags are assigned importance based upon what they are (h3, h4, etc).

And another interesting attribute not often considered is the role attribute.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab/

I’m not finding any information about whether or not it influences search engines, but it’s certainly useful for accessibility.

To tack on to what Susan said, I also use "robots-nocontent" tag to help underemphasis parts of a page.

Quote from: sottwell at Jul 29, 2010, 10:00 AM

And another interesting attribute not often considered is the role attribute.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab/

I’m not finding any information about whether or not it influences search engines, but it’s certainly useful for accessibility.

The role attribute is gaining importance because they are used in the WAI-ARIA spec.
I consider it good practice to add at least the ARIA landmark roles to your site.
http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-aria-landmark-roles.html
I’m also not sure what it does in respect to SEO but i can imagine these role attributes being important (in the future).

I really don’t think the html source order is that important. So what if you’ve got your sidebar first. Search engines are smart enough and with adding some skiplinks and possibly role tags it doesn’t matter for accessibility.

The h3 will be seen. The concept you are describing is a relatively very effective method of laying out a page, much like a book page would be laid out. If done correctly, it can greatly enhance your standings in search engines -- at least it appears to work for me and my clients.