Someone asked me why I hide the sidebar on this blog by default, then show it in a different part of the HTML, so here’s the explanation…

Most blog themes float the main body to the left, and make the sidebar on the right “static”. I did the opposite when creating my custom WordPress theme… My sidebar is a DIV that is floated to the right. The reason for this then the content below the bottom of the sidebar wrap around it, which I just think looks better. So here’s the problem… Google weighs content at the beginning of a page higher than content at the bottom, so Google was seeing 99% of my pages as “similar content” because my sidebar needed to be at the top of the HTML source.

So to solve that problem, I just put the sidebar at the bottom of the page in a hidden (with CSS) DIV, then call a simple script to set the contents of an empty DIV (<div id=”sidebar”></div>) at the top of the page, where the sidebar needs to be, to the contents of whatever is in the hidden DIV at the bottom…

<script language="javascript">
      document.getElementById('sidebar').innerHTML = document.getElementById('sidebar_content').innerHTML
</script>

For web browsers, the sidebar renders at the beginning of the HTML source, but Google sees the sidebar at the end of the HTML and pages no longer are seen as 99% similar.