 Positioning With Css For Rankings |
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 May 25 2005, 08:36 PM
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#1
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HR 1  Group: Members Posts: 7 Joined: 22-May 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 03:27 PM From: Dallas, TX Member No.: 7,546  |
I was curious if CSS and absolute positioning of text would help or hurt a site’s listing. Say the top section of a page was something like a welcome page that changed everyday, but the middle section of your content was the bulk of your keyword rich text. Would something like this work or not? What are everyone’s thoughts?
<div id="center content"> <p>keywords</p> </div> </div id = “top content”> <p>general text</p> </div> |
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May 25 2005, 09:28 PM
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#2
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 HR 6 Group: Active Members Posts: 940 Joined: 28-April 04 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 04:27 PM From: London, Ontario Member No.: 3,389 |
The thought has been expressed that, if your pages are disasterously bulked up with code before they get to any content, redoing the page with CSS could make the pages a bit easier to crawl and index. Maybe...
Other than that, CSS won't affect rankings. It's purpose is presentation, not content, and Search Engines look at content. L. |
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May 25 2005, 09:31 PM
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#3
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 HR 5 Group: Active Members Posts: 343 Joined: 5-March 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 12:27 PM From: San Diego Member No.: 6,804 |
I don’t believe search engines look at CSS, so they might be neutral on the css positioning.
However, I believe most of the search engines like pages with continually updated content. BTW, I don’t know if this was a typo, but </div id = “top content”> should be <div id = “top content”>. |
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May 25 2005, 09:32 PM
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#4
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HR 6 Group: Active Members Posts: 940 Joined: 28-April 04 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 04:27 PM From: London, Ontario Member No.: 3,389 |
QUOTE(fivecents @ May 25 2005, 10:31 PM) However, I believe most of the search engines like pages with continually updated content.  My understanding (?) is that SEs only "like" sites with frequent updates in the sense that they will return to these sites more often to re-index them. However, frequent visits will not improve ranking. L. |
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May 25 2005, 10:48 PM
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#5
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 High Rankings Advisor  Group: Admin Posts: 29,201 Joined: 21-July 03 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 03:27 PM From: Ashland, MA Member No.: 2 |
QUOTE I was curious if CSS and absolute positioning of text would help or hurt a site’s listing. Neither, in my opinion. The positioning of text is highly overrated. QUOTE My understanding (?) is that SEs only "like" sites with frequent updates in the sense that they will return to these sites more often to re-index them. However, frequent visits will not improve ranking. Yes, that is also my understanding. |
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May 26 2005, 01:41 PM
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#6
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HR 1 Group: Members Posts: 7 Joined: 22-May 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 03:27 PM From: Dallas, TX Member No.: 7,546 |
That's what I was trying to ask is if the placement of text had any bearing on ranking and if so would CSS help.
Thanks Jill. |
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Jun 1 2005, 03:28 AM
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#7
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 HR 3 Group: Active Members Posts: 74 Joined: 31-May 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 08:27 PM Member No.: 7,603 |
A search engine's view of a page is somewhat similar to what a text browser sees. There are quite a few spider simulators online, www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi for example.
To the best of my knowledge, all CSS is ignored by search engines. CSS separates the content of a page from its visual appearance. CSS Zen Garden is a wonderful showcase of what is it possible to achieve with CSS techniques. So you can write a page which contains your ideal text, ideally structured from an SEO point of view and make it look any way you want. Using it as a cloaking technique is perfectly possible, but you can bet the smart guys at Google are thinking up a way to detect CSS abuse, so it is probably best not to go there. A good use of CSS would be repairing a Splash page. For example: CODE <body> <object>My-Pointless-Timewasting-Flash-Movie</object> </object> </body> could become.. CODE <body> <object>My-Pointless-Timewasting-Flash-Movie</object> </object> <div style="display:none">My nice SEO intro text and very useful text links</div> </body> Both would look exactly the same. CSS is a powerful technique and well worth exploring, this example can also be used as way to make a page WAI/s508 compliant. This post has been edited by chrishirst: Jun 1 2005, 04:50 AM |
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Jun 1 2005, 08:42 AM
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#8
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 HR 10  Group: Moderator Posts: 7,489 Joined: 24-July 03 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 03:27 PM From: Somerville, MA Member No.: 22 |
An even better way to do that would be
CODE <body> <object>My-Pointless-Timewasting-Flash-Movie <p>My nice SEO intro text and very useful text link</p></object> </object> Of course, that doesn't involve CSS at all, so it's a bit off-topic (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) |
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Jun 1 2005, 10:54 AM
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#9
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HR 3 Group: Active Members Posts: 74 Joined: 31-May 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 08:27 PM Member No.: 7,603 |
You could do that but then the text would display on the page. The point I was trying to make is that using CSS can allow the splash page to be visually unchanged.
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Jun 1 2005, 11:12 AM
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#10
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HR 10 Group: Moderator Posts: 7,489 Joined: 24-July 03 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 03:27 PM From: Somerville, MA Member No.: 22 |
If you put the object's alternate content inside the object element, it will only display for users that cannot parse the object itself.
But I'm leading us further (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/offtopic.gif) so I'll shut up now. |
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Jun 1 2005, 11:35 AM
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#11
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 HR 5 Group: Active Members Posts: 301 Joined: 31-July 03 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 05:27 PM From: Chicago Member No.: 165 |
Wait, I think there is an important point here. microbe is suggesting putting the text into the css, so it would be visible to the search engine, but not displayed to the user. My expectation would be that the text would not be helpful from an SEO perspective, because search engines focus on text that is visible to the visitor. Is that correct?
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Jun 1 2005, 12:35 PM
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#12
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 Photographer Group: Active Members Posts: 504 Joined: 22-September 03 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 01:27 PM From: Beaverton, Oregon Member No.: 866 |
If you look at the source of a web page and strip out all the CSS tags (and HTML tags for that matter) that happen to be "in-stream" you will see what a SE will sees.
If a block of text is set to display:None then the browser will not display it (unless it is tied to an event triggered by a user, just like a layer event using JavaScript) at all, but the SE will still see it. If this is done on a wide scale on a site it would be a form of SE spamming since what the user sees and the spider sees are two different items - just like white letters on white background using font colors. If the SE spiders take on the features of a full browser and learn how to parse CSS and HTML then they would be in a position to detect and drop sites that do this based on some threshhold. As to if text is more highly valued at the top of a page versus being at the bottom of a page I have not seen anything in the real world to verify or disprove this. So far what I have seen is that text is text and it matters more within context of where it appears in relation to the immediate words around it more than where it is placed on a page. If the SEs are rewritten to using the correct syntax of the written language following those rules for paragraph, sentence, chapter book struture on how it is to be correctly written, then it would matter. I would think that they are moving in that direction in which case SEOs and copywriters would be in more demand to use the language they are writing in correctly since most people never learn proper language syntax and by design SE have to know what is proper to figure things out. Badly written sentences paragraphs would - by necessity of design - downgraded in revelance since it is not proper it cannot be revelant. This would in turn wipe out random words and sentences that current spammers use to fill pages and e-mails. |
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Jun 1 2005, 05:42 PM
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#13
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HR 3 Group: Active Members Posts: 74 Joined: 31-May 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 08:27 PM Member No.: 7,603 |
taphilo, I think you have just about summed it up.
Up until XHTML and CSS came out web pages more or less had to be a tangled mess, all broken up into boxes (table cells) with no logic to the flow of text in the underlying document. With CSS, you can take a piece of plain text and fancy it up any way you like, without interfering with the underlying document. You can see this in action with a Wordpress or Movable Type blog by summoning a print preview, since they are set up to use different style sheets for print layout. Coming attractions, (with v7, IE should at last get round to supporting CSS properly) include image rollovers without Javascript. |
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Jun 2 2005, 03:13 AM
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#14
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 HR 9 Group: Moderator Posts: 4,356 Joined: 13-August 03 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 08:27 PM From: Blackpool UK Member No.: 492 |
Why do we need IE7 for image rollovers without javascript ?
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Jun 2 2005, 06:00 AM
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#15
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HR 3 Group: Active Members Posts: 74 Joined: 31-May 05 User's local time: Feb 9 2010, 08:27 PM Member No.: 7,603 |
Because we haven't read your article? (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/embarrassed.gif)
The flash to black when the images change is annoying though. I have recently been triying to implement one of these for a client to make their site navigable, but have really struggled with browsers not laying the code out consistently, it may be this has more to do with the menu being dynamically generated or me being rubbish. I will take a look through your code in detail. Thanks for the pointer. |
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