Hi, I guess I want to interject here a bit. Maybe steer the conversation in a different direction because I'm very interested in this topic being a person who believes in the benefits of CSS, and who does quite a lot of SEO.
>From Lea's previous post: "> I've been searching around for an answer to this and many people are > saying 'maybe' Google does read your css. Does anyone know this for a > fact? If the log files dont show them loading it then they dont have the data to analyse it." Guys, can we take the focus off of the CSS file? I don't think Google or any engine cares what's in that file because it doesn't contain data relevant to site content. However, what I am wondering is this ... 1) What kind of SEO impact does using CSS to *remove* all of the styling junk from an HTML page have? Meaning we have a leaner cleaner page, a smaller page, and a page with more focused content. Does this provide an SEO benefit? 2) And how does using good semantic code in your HTML help SEO, if at all? Do the engines prefer to read semantic code, and if so why? Does that translate to an SEO benefit? I think these questions are relevant because if we could answer them in the positive with some certainty we'd have another legitimate benefit to using CSS, and we could use the knowledge as a basis for possibly deriving strategy to use CSS to provide a stronger SEO benefit. Currently my belief is that CSS doesn't have an impact on SEO significant enough to warrant redesigning a site in CSS for that reason alone. But, I'd really love to be proven wrong. Chris Rizzo -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lea de Groot Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 9:24 PM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Search Engines and CSS On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:14:04 +1100, Ryan Sabir wrote: > Does anyone have a definitive answer on whether search engines take > any notice of CSS? If you examine your log files, you will find that Googlebot et al never call for your css file. Thus they are not viewing it, and not using it to determine the site. > We have known for a long time that is you have a text coloured the > same as its background then search engines will consider this as an > attempt to fool them, and lower your pages ranking... but what about > doing the same thing with CSS? They are reliant on people reporting sites for this. > We are always told > the search engines pay respect to markup, so then this H1 content > would be given high relevance. No, not particularly - the search engines dont seem to be semantic at all. > I've been searching around for an answer to this and many people are > saying 'maybe' Google does read your css. Does anyone know this for a > fact? If the log files dont show them loading it then they dont have the data to analyse it. Simple. Lea -- Lea de Groot Elysian Systems - I Understand the Internet <http://elysiansystems.com/> Search Engine Optimisation, Usability, Information Architecture, Web Design Brisbane, Australia ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ****************************************************** ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
