no media definition = spam in google

several sites have triggered the "hidden text" penalty

[PatrickDeese]

I just thought people might want to revise their stylesheets links and make sure that that are putting a media definition in their stylesheets.

I have personally seen 3 different cases in the last 7 days of sites being removed from the google index for no apparent reason - the only thing that these sites have in common is that their stylesheets are written like this:

<link href="css/css.css" rel=stylesheet type="text/css">

I have suggested to the 3 site owners that they change their links to read as follows:

<link HREF="css/css.css" REL="stylesheet"
TYPE="text/css" media="all">

Has anyone else noticed this?

[DrDoc]

Why would this trigger a Google ban? If my stylesheet is meant for all media, then I don't specify it. And I've never been banned from Google, nor have I seen anyone else get banned for not specifying the media type. Media is not a required attribute, so, Google cannot (and would not) force anyone to include it.

[Symbios]

I use on over a 100 sites using the example below and none are banned or have been removed from Google;

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">

Could be something else, is there any hidden text.

[PatrickDeese]

Could be something else, is there any hidden text.

I have now seen 3 websites get "gray barred" and have had no "naughty" promotion techniques - one of them is non-commercial and has had web presence since 1996 - google currently shows this site with 200+ backlinks - yet it is "not ranked", and is not in the cache.

The only feasible explanation I can come up with is a hidden text penalty.

The only possibility I can see is that the media wasn't defined in the stylesheet - I came across this site in google support NG in usenet - so this isn't a "site review" plea.

It definitely seems odd to me - perhaps its a bug in google's "spambot" - but now I've seen 2 other cases of this, all within 7 days or so - to me that means it is definitely worth looking in to.

[Symbios]

If a site is showing backward links then its unlikely that its been banned, might be part of the yoyo effect, I have some sites appering and disappearing daily at the moment.

A couple of months back I had a site grey barred that got spidered when the server was down, googlebot revisted and eventually the PR came back together with the SERP's.

I'm hoping its not the css as that could take out a lot of sites on the www and I really don't believe that G would put in a penalty for that.

Could be something else if you send me a sticky with the URL's I'll have a look to see if I can spot anything.