Spiders and CSS-P

Any good or bad experiences?

[jenkers]

Hi,
I've just completely overhauled an old site.

I've been putting it off for ages as some of the pages in the site rank really well in SE's.

My redesign has been along the lines of using an external style sheet - and CSS-P.

That is - I have almost completely seperated the structure of the site from the content. All of the layers for content are absolutely positioned from the stylesheet. All of the text formatting etc is done through the sylesheet.

Basically my html files are proportionally much much more content than mark-up.

I have ordered the layers so that the content gets piped first to the browser and the navigation elements last.

I hope this will help my site, not only in speed of loading - browser compatibility etc - but also in easier content manipulation vis-a-vis SEO strategies.

Before I take the plunge, does anyone have any experience of this they could share?

Drawbacks, plusses etc...

[createErrorMsg]

Just do it. This stuff is now well-established, white hat SEO. Even if all the stories are untrue and there is nothing in the algos that would make what you've done rank your site better, you'll be able to hold your head high that your site is cleaner, leaner, and more valid than 90% of the schlock out there.

cEM

[MatthewHSE]

When I changed my site over to source-ordered CSS layout, my rankings jumped almost immediately. There were also other factors coming into play about that time so I hate to extrapolate too much on the effect of CSS-P, but I certainly could not point to any negative effects.

Incidentally, as I'm sure you know, the same aspects of CSS Positioning that make it so nice for SEO work are the same techniques used to make your site more accessible. I highly doubt the SE's will ban or penalize a site for using methods that have many legitimate uses other than SEO.

[jenkers]

thanks for the replies - exactly what I wanted to hear.

[bbcarter]

I'm just starting with CSS- sorry I waited- it's awesome.

And as an SEO guy, what I like is how it keeps the HTML code clean. Fewer tables.

I suspect that bots have a limit on the kilobytes of HTLML data they'll pull and analyze- so the more of it is your keyword optimized text, and the less is formatting tags, the better.

I don't know about you, but without CSS, I had "table creep"- I'd look at my tables view in dreamweaver and be disgusted by how many I had put in