8 replies to this topic

[Rajesh]

Hi All
What do you think is CSS is friendly as per the search engine? If yes then we can use excess of css as much the requirement or some limitation is there?
The reason for this asking is now a day CSS is very popular for designing the new website.

Regards

[qwerty]

At least so far, search engines don't care either way about CSS. They're interested in the content in your tags, not the way those tags are formatted (unless of course, you're trying to hide something).

[JohneeMac]

CSS can surely only be a good thing if the content of the pages are found easier!?!

[Bri]

We are going full CSS with all of our sites and have not noticed any slump in our rankings since we have been doing so. either way, if your using DW mx4, Css is pretty much automatic.

[qwerty]

CSS can surely only be a good thing if the content of the pages are found easier!?!

It's certainly not a bad thing, but spiders are quite capable of skipping the code that's irrelevant to them. In that sense, the only way CSS would give you a direct benefit would be if the page were so large that the spider couldn't get through all of it, but switching to CSS and thereby removing the formatting from the HTML made it small enough to get through.

[Raphael]

Hi All
What do you think is CSS is friendly as per the search engine? If yes then we can use excess of css as much the requirement or some limitation is there?
The reason for this asking is now a day CSS is very popular for designing the new website.

Regards

CSS is user and accessibility friendly. IMO, that's much more important.

[mitash]

Hi,

CSS has been used widely and using CSS for websites/web applications is becoming a standard.

There are many advantages of using CSS...

1) Control of the design is centralised, changing design site wide is very easy
2) It makes the source code nice and clean if using external style sheets (good for the visiting spiders)
3) External CSS makes the page fast loading
4) Not to forget it makes the site SEO Friendly to some extent
5) If used properly you can have the whole site design driven by CSS
6) You can control many documents in once CSS

If you would like to lean about basic use of CSS, a good source is W3Schools website. They have good tutorials and good examples too.

www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Have Fun!
Ashish Mehta

Edited by chrishirst, 22 September 2005 - 01:24 AM.

[Rajesh]

Thanks to all for your valid information on it.

[Sleeve]

Rajesh,

My experience with CSS has been so good, I won't consider building antother website without a pure, fluid, 100% tableless design.

I am a parter in a small company that went national 4 years ago thanks to the hokey pokey, hanky danky website I first built. It was build using the typical javascript and tables design. The source-code-to-text ratio was terrible and so were the rankings even though I studied and implimented SEO with authority.

In short, I later built the same 300+ page website using pure CSS and I got rid of all the tables and learned how to do the same javascript rollover images and menus using nothing but 100% pure CSS. There was not a single page on the site that exceeded 30k including images after I was done. The copy started immediately after the metatags on every page and I was able to use absolute positioning so that the code for my left hand side menu's source code was at the very bottom of my page.

After launching the website with the same copy, same meta tags and the same SEO techniques as the first design, my rankings shot though the roof and our company enjoyed a 600% increase in traffic and a 70% increase in sales that year.

...Ahhh, the simplicity of a pure CSS design lead to far fewer frustrations when trying to write javacrap functions that were browser specfic also.

Up with pure CSS, down with tables. Although I am no expert and this was tested only once, I am convinced that a CSS design was a major contributor to higher rankings in this case.

Edited by Sleeve, 02 October 2005 - 08:31 AM.