52 replies to this topic

[Mel]

So if you ever need help with anything concerning CSS, I'd be more than happy to help you out as best I can!

No Thanks Rabbit

I use CSS in all my sites (to quite good effect I believe) and at anyrate would prefer to get my instruction in a more pleasant manner.

[rabbit]

*sighs* Some people are just no fun at all.

[sandman99]

<my first post />

With regard to the issue bounced back and forth about whether the position of the content is important - according to "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page's thesis (engineers at Google), they mention that keywords appearing anywhere from the 0 to 4096th position in a page are marked as plain hits (there are other markers for plain hits, this being one of them).

Does anyone have any refutation of this? Is there any evidence that google has veered from this plan since this thesis was written?

"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":

http://www7.scu.edu....921/com1921.htm

[cherb]

[Sorry I didn't see the post on Page 2 before I posted, I only looked at Page 1 & 3.]

Just to get back a little closer to LesSmith's original post (not that the subsequent discussion wasn't educational or beneficial), Zeldman's A List Apart web magazine has a short and sweet article about how CSS affects search engine optimization: CSS and SEO

It address some of the very issues discussed in this thread (DIVs vs. tables, compatability and CSS support with old and new browsers, etc.).

I highly recommend Zeldman and A List Apart as great CSS resources for anyone out there looking to make the switch from table-based to CSS-based layout. The Web Standards Project is another resource on web standards and accessibility.


Chris H.
BizNetix, Inc. >> Web site design, Web application programming, Search Engine Optimization

[Drew-z]

I use CSS in all my sites (to quite good effect I believe)

maybe you would like to see CSS validation results for your home page in that regard.

[Mel]

HI Drew

Whats your point? Do my pages not work in your viewer, or do you just think we should all comply with recommendations that do nothing towards improving the user experience?

I believe I said to good effect and to me that means they work they way I want them to.

If you want to spend hours changing attributes that work fine in all the major browsers just so that can say you're compliant be my guest.

[Denyse]

When evaluating the weight of a link, Google wants to know as much as it can about it. Complicated issues such as Javascript, bad coding, image map links, and CSS hurt the process because these make Googlebot work too hard, which can lead to mistakes while spidering webpages.

This was in today's Search Engine Watch Search Day.

The bit about CSS hurting the process because they make Googlebot work too hard, and that it can lead to mistakes while spidering webpages, has me puzzled.

I would have thought that CSS on the contrary would make life easier for the bots.

Can anyone explain this to me ?

Sign me

Puzzled in Canada

[Scottie]

Hmnn... maybe they are talking about on-page or in-line CSS? The bots don't see external stylesheets as far as I know.

[Denyse]

So can the fact that they can't see them cause trouble ?

I guess I can sort of see why internal or local CSS might add a lot of non HTML code to a page and that maybe it would be cumbersome, but ... no I don't really see that... and anyway, how could external CSS do anything but be beneficial to the SEO process ?

As Yul Brinner said "it is a puzzlement"

[qwerty]

I don't get it at all. No matter what kind of CSS you use (except for inline) it's going to make your code lighter than defining styles within the tag.

Even if you use the style sheet to do something completely outrageous with your links (say 30 point, bold, bright yellow, crossed out with a red box surrounding it and a pink background) your code is still <a href="page.htm">. A link is just a link.

[Mel]

CSS is a powerful technology that can be used to produce better looking pages with lighter code, but it can also be used to hide blocks of text (or even entire pages) by any of several methods, and if you use an external CSS file that is spiders are denied access to it can be very hard for search engine to stop this type of spam.

Perhaps this is what they are talking about, but at the moment I don't see the SEs dong much about penalizing this type of spam.

[Denyse]

I guess if you play around with the visibility and layers you could hide text, and if the SE can't see the code because it's in an external text file (although they have the link to it) they would not know you're using spammy techniques.

So I guess its a question of internal or external files. Sort of a dammed if you do, and dammed if you don't situation. On the one hand, internal CSS add weight (but maybe not as much as putting styles in the tag), on the other external CSS can't be spidered to check the code.

It brings up the question of whether the bots can read styles (internal or external)? and if they can why they could not follow the CSS external link - as QWERTY said, a link is just link.

[Mel]

Sure the bots can read CSS files, but you could put your CSS file in a directory that your robots.txt file asks spiders not to visit.

BTW there are at least three methods that I am aware of which can be used to hide whatever with CSS, and each of them are just a line in the CSS file.

[qwerty]

That's true, but I can't believe that a search engine would jump to the conclusion that if a site uses a style sheet, they must be hiding something. That means that either they can read the css, and so they can tell whether something is set to be hidden, or they can't so we're back to a link being read just as a link.

Now, if they do read style sheets, I suppose that adds an extra element to their processing, but once they've done it, it's cached (like it would be in any user-agent), so it shouldn't slow them down significantly.

The one thing about this that I think could really matter is that I don't think it's wise to deny robots access to your style sheet. Even if they can't read it, I would guess that the fact that it's hidden from them would tell them there's a reason you don't want them seeing it.

[csjavi]

If and when search engines start parsing style sheets, I hope their parsers will be intelligent. For example, my print style sheet hides my navigation links and some graphical elements. It would be a bummer to get penalized for that. The opposite could also be true. I might have something that I want on a printed page but not on the user's screen.