In my entry into SEO (and admittedly the subject is in constant change) I had read SEO Warrior.
In that book it explained the concept of increasing a page’s SEO value by placing navigation at the bottom of the page’s markup, and then anchoring at the top using javascript.
As time went on, the web changed, and now floating navigation bars are the norm – hence it does’t matter where the HTML for the bar is located, because it will always stick to the top.
That being said, the best and most relevant SEO of the page (theoretically) occurs at the top of the page’s markup and declines toward the footer.
Meanwhile, navigation bars take up a SIGNIFICANT amount of markup to create all of those lists. So there you have a lot of clutter potentially getting in the way of SEO.
Is it possible that routinely writing ALL navigation markup to the bottom of the page while relying on javascript to pin it to the top will improve SEO?