Left sidebar is better than right sidebar if talking about SEO. Actually, that’s what I have observed. However, if you can make the right sidebar appear first before the content (it will be done by hacking the css), then i think it will be better… that is if you will use the right sidebar instead of the left sidebar.

In my blog, I am using the three column design and all the side bars appear first before the content. I decided to do this so that search engine will scan first those links posted on the sidebars before the content……. however, i am not really sure about it really helps…

I originally thought it was a problem on either my htaccess or robots.txt even though Google wasn’t flagging any error on the Sitemaps site so I kept tweaking for about two weeks. At the time, the site was indexing well on Yahoo (didn’t check on MSN.)

I suspected it was a sandbox/trustbox issue since the site was new with only a few incoming links. I decided to try moving the thing to a folder and wrote a static index page since all my sites on that setup indexed very well.

That did the trick though I never really figured out what the problem was in the first place.

If crawlability is the issue, there could be other factors why it happens that way.

I actually moved one of my blogs which I originally put in the root into this format recently because none of the posts were getting indexed even though it’s being crawled with no error by Google Sitemaps. After doing the change, I had over 40 pages indexed within three days. Google loves static obviously.

In the last part of my post, I mentioned that these steps are highly recommended for newly set up blogs. If you have an old blog like mine, there’s a huge risk that some of the tweaks you do could actually affect your current traffic negatively.

In my case, if I change my permalinks, all existing PR of pages will reset back to zero.

Put the blog only in the root directory: This is often inconvenient. especially on an established site. My best AdSense performer is in a sub-directory .. what exactly are the disadvantages of leaving it there … I see other sub-directory blogs seem to get crawled pretty well … but I’m so inexperienced on this I may be missing something.

Change the permalink structure: Last month I changed my blogs and my wife’s blogs to %postname% structure _Bam_ double the identifiable searches and nearly double add revenue in a month … highly recommended. So my question is: why aren’t you doing it here?

That might be a good layout for some niche blog though for SEO purposes, the more text you have on your front page (usually the page with the highest PR) the better the ranking for those entries.

@ Manuel

Didn’t DreamHost gave you some mod_rewrite rules to overcome this issue?

Each time I try to add another folder (for static html files), I’ll just edit the htaccess file. But if I put the WP blog in a folder of its own, then I won’t have to touch the htaccess file anymore.

(I’m testing the notion that a site that has a combination of a WP blog and the traditional, hierarchical old-style static html structure helps earn more SEO points.)