pure css buttons - seo related ?

[mihomes]

So I made a very nice css button class... gradients, rounded corners, hover states, diff colors, etc...

The 'problem' is I use the buttons in the same manner across the site for multiple products. For instance, view more, view demo, buy now, etc.

What I recently noticed is Google is showing results for these terms in their engine... way down in the 200+ position, but listing none the less.

I could always change the anchor text to be more specifc to the product like widget features, buy widget now, etc however, the visual appearance doesn't look right to me and the buttons would soon turn very long.

Without going back to pure image buttons using the title tag or alt tag for description is there any other recommendations or just let it be and hope Google figures it out?

This is one of the possible things I have on my list as a possible reason for drop in rankings.

Opinions please.

[drhowarddrfine]

Google doesn't look at your CSS so it doesn't matter with that.

[lucy24]

Google looks at everything. See multiple earlier threads about, for example, g### indexing sitemaps and robots.txt. (To say nothing of the staggering number of idiots who put their raw logs in a place that can be found and indexed-- but that's a different issue.)

Do you mean that you're using the identical buttons with identical text on multiple sites? How much variation is there?

On one hand: If the whole site is about foobars there's no reason for a button to say "foobar features" "buy foobars" etc. In fact it would make it all look suspiciously mass-produced.

On the other hand: if you include the "sizes" or "colors" buttons on sites for widgets that don't come in sizes and colors, then that will get you the mass-produced look.

[mihomes]

I'm saying identical button/anchor text across the site for multiple products yet linking to different pages.

Say the description for blue widgets has a features, pricing, buy now - each using the button class so it is shaped like a button of course, but linking to its respective pages.

Then yellow widgets would have the exact same setup just linking to its pages.

Before when using images as the buttons I could accomplish the same thing yet would use the alt=blue widget features, alt=blue widget pricing, alt=buy blue widgets, etc.

Here, with pure css buttons the anchor text is the same.

[lucy24]

Oops. That will teach me to read too fast. Not your homegrown CMS, just an up-to-date site using buttons as God intended them to be used instead of faking it with images the way we did in the old days.

No images, therefore no alt text... but what about the links themselves? If you've got a button on the subdirectory index page

www.example.com/people-eaters/flying/

leading to
www.example.com/people-eaters/flying/purple.php

then the link itself can say either
purple.php

or
/people-eaters/flying/purple.php

There have got to be threads and threads and threads of discussion about the SEO effects of the two forms. Not here in CSS, of course ;)

Also about the Duplicate Content perils of having
people-eaters/flying/purple.php
and
people-eaters/purple/flying.php
end up on the same page. Maybe I did not make up the ideal example.

Is there any solid information about how search engines use <title="blahblah"> text? Almost any html element in the world can have a title.

[mihomes]

I thought about using the title attribute on these button links, but then you run into the problem of having that title text 'popup' when hovered over and I don't really want that either.

[lucy24]

Ugh, yuk, forgot about that detail. When you're in navigation, you definitely don't want yet another doodad popping up in your face. Don't suppose there's such a thing as a non-displaying title...

[drhowarddrfine]

Google looks at everything. See multiple earlier threads about, for example, g### indexing sitemaps and robots.txt.

He's talking about CSS of a button, not external files.