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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 07/14/07 11:48
Scripsit dorayme:
> CSS is for styling the webpage. Search robots are not known for
> their sense of style. They are cold, calculating types, without
> feeling, without aesthetics, without the slightest warmth.
Yet they can become cruel if they detect things that they regard as unfair,
cheating, and intentionally misleading. They are known to recognize "hidden"
text (intended to affect search engines without being seen by users) such as
white text on white background, implemented using <font color="white"> for
example. Some of them even recognize situations where the text color is
almost the same (and virtually the same to human eyes) as the background
though with a different color value. Ad what they do then is probably the
removal of the page, if not the entire site, from their database. They might
even block the site so that when they see links to their pages, they just
skip them as crap.
The odds are that if you cheat in a similar manner using CSS, you'll get
away with it. Processing style sheets is much more complex than processing
<font> tags. Effectively, a search engine (technically, an indexing robots)
would have to render the page visually in a virtual world and then recognize
whether some text is actually hidden. And then many tricky CSS techniques
would get their due reward. This is surely _possible_ but it is not
_probable_, and I have not seen any symptoms or even claims that search
engines pay attention to CSS code.
If they do, however, it will hardly matter whether the CSS code is "inline"
(in style="..." attributes) or "embedded" (in <style ...>...</style>
elements) or "external" (referred to via <link ...> elements). It's fairly
trivial to deal with these ways, and surely much simpler than actual
processing of stylesheets.
The most difficult question, however, is why the OP asked the question. Why
would it matter?
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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