Forum Moderators: open
Q: how will google react?
will h2 be accepted as the MAIN header or a sub header, will google look around for a h1, not find it and say:
h2, ok no problem, but i would have given you a couple more points for h1.
colin
but isn't the jury still out on using CSS for that, or does'nt Google mind, now and in the future?
colin
No jury, not even a trial. If you're worried about google picking up on css resizing of H1 tags, try doing some searches for major queries and looking at how many sites are using CSS hiding to show googlebot one thing and visitors another.
Resizing headings is a legitmate design technique and so it would be counter-productive for Google to attempt to penalise sites based on this.
I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that Google minds you resizing headings, or for that matter that Google even attempts to interpret style at all.
>> Resizing headings is a legitmate design technique and so it would be counter-productive for Google to attempt to penalise sites based on this.
Would it ever, they might lose half their index :)
There is nothing even worth talking about with regards to resizing with CSS. It's the way html is supposed to work. Simple as that.
Nick
If you want your H1 to display properly, even in tables, you may use the "display:inline" as well, as in:
<h1 style="font-size: 20px;display:inline;">
This would prevent to add extra space before and after the <h1> tag.
Dan
Do you have something in your css files you want to hide?
But seriously, in general why let spiders crawl CSS? It's no use to them because they don't have eyes to see...
If Google were to introduce rules about allowing/not allowing access to css files then we would be looking at a case of the web imitating google rather than google imitating the web ;)
That said, I see this becoming more of an issue as people use CSS to 'cloak' content on their site from SE spiders. Of course, anyone with a non-css browser and a keyboard can fill in a spam report...
And anyone dumb enough to cloak with CSS rather than IP/UA delivery deserves to be caught. ;)
Nick
It is indeed! :)
I'm using it to be able to use <H1> tags in table without the +/- 20 pixels whitespace lost above and below those tags.
It is still a title and displays with an appropriate size for a title, but I bave much better control on positionning.
The pagetitle above the blue bar on the site in my profile is <H1> , sized 20px and using the "display:online;" - looks neat IMHO ;)
Dan
>>I'm using it to be able to use <H1> tags in table without the +/- 20 >>pixels whitespace lost above and below those tags.
Also keep in mind that you can control the margin above and below the header with margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px;.
I think the most useful reason for using display: inline; on a header is make it appear to be part of the first paragraph.
It's also obvious that you can get "hidden H1 text" past any conceivable spider. (And that doing so _deserves_ the eternal Google ban on that and all associated sites.)
The only problem you COULD run into, is a color change that makes the heading appear to be the same color as the background. This can be fixed easily enough--it's already a basic design principle: always declare textcolor and background color in exactly all the same places; and if there is a background image, declare the background color to be something close to the dominant color in the image.
The combination of those two rules will enable your _color_ layout to be transparent to programs with any degree of CSS support, whether spiders or browsers.
now i like that!
Yeah, me too!
Headings are used in many ways, I have my own way of using them. I tend to use a lot of things that are there to be used (title tags, alt tags, etc.) for design/focusing reasons, headings is just one of them. So long as they make sense, there should be no problems.
I think this is one more reason for using directory results rather then se results for generic (Spammed) terms.
Personally, if I were Google, I would penalize sites that put a deny for the css file in their robots.txt file, and I would penalise for the use of ANY keywords in the CSS file (as this is not natural).
Giving any weight at all to the h1 tag makes no sense at all. A better algorithm would compare the font size of of text to the average font size of the page, and use that to give extra importance to headings.
Sites with the CSS file hidden in to robots should definitely be penalized... otherwise God only knows what the site really looks like.
You can always go and have a look ;)
If you use robots.txt to restrict bandwidth used up by spiders, you WILL ban CSS files as there is no reason for spiders to index them.
So penalising people for banning css files in robots.txt would, again, be counter-productive. Although that said, I think it might be something google would consider, depending on the scale of the problem of people abusing this.
I don't buy any of this 'checking' malarky. Not one little bit of it.
It's simply too hard to seperate good from bad without a handcheck. It'll be the same as cloaking in my opiion. There'll be an 'exceptable amount' of folks who get away with display: none; and positioning off the page etc but it will take a handcheck to ban them.
Or, at very most. Certain things will throw up a red flag. Probably in conjunction with other factors. Again, a red flag for a handcheck not an auto penalization.
Nick
I doubt that there will be penalties for using CSS. Maybe a type of validator similar to Safesurf, where you can go and get a metatag after you declare something about your stylesheet?
