Posted by dorayme on 07/14/07 23:09

In article <9H2mi.191524$Lk7.82836@reader1.news.saunalahti.fi>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:

> 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. ... 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 ...

> The most difficult question, however, is why the OP asked the question. Why
> would it matter?

Might have been idle curiousity or a confession about what would
really motivate him to use css (search status benefits)? Anyway,
there is one point I forgot to mention where css can actually aid
the search algorithms. I understand that these robots tend to
look at the beginning of the html body (I do not know the
details). But the order in the html can be manipulated to be of
the greatest advantage to search engines while the css can
control the visual or aural order of the presentation in the
browsers. These two orders can be quite different. The op might
care to note this.

Sometimes, authors choose to put the content above the navigation
or vice versa. The css might specify different positioning to the
default html. And this can, I understand, make a difference to
the search engines.

--
dorayme

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