Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 07/15/07 07:23

Scripsit dorayme:

> [...] 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).

That is my impression too, though I have not seen any hard facts on it,
still less details. It's a natural assumption anyway. Moreover, when a
search engine creates a short excerpt of a document, to be presented in a
list of search results, it may use the first dozen or so words from the
start. However, search engines may also pick up excerpts around (first)
occurrences of the search words.

> 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.

That is correct. It needs to be remembered, though, that the "pure HTML"
order will be used when CSS is not supported by a browser, or CSS support is
disabled, or the browser has been instructed to ignore author style sheets.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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