Re: Hidden text and .css files

css crawling

[yonnermark]

Do google's spiders crawl the css?
If not, then using keyword-rich hidden text is surely undetectable by a spider.

The only way one would get caught would be if a human (competitor) reported the hidden text to google. But even then, I hear that google wouldn't penalise a site, they would instead endeavour to alter their algos to try
and catch hidden text using css. I read somewhere that google don't [generally] manually penalise sites.

Can someone shed any light on google & css?

thanks
mark

[WebGuerrilla]

CSS files are not downloaded in normal crawls. However, they do have spam detection tools that are capable of checking CSS.

You can find more about Google's hidden text filters in this previous thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Mohamed_E]

The only way one would get caught would be if a human (competitor) reported the hidden text to google.

If your site is successful your competitors will look at it very carefully, and at least one of them will report anything suspicious in it to Google.

But even then, I hear that google wouldn't penalise a site, they would instead endeavour to alter their algos ...

In theory that is their preferred approach, in practice they do remove a lot of reported sites.

Be very careful before you cross the line, and be sure you have a Plan B should you get thrown out of the index.

<edit>Removed a snippet that was pasted by mistake :( </edit>

[edited by: Mohamed_E at 11:56 pm (utc) on Sep. 17, 2003]

[yonnermark]

Thanks for the replies guys.
Very useful information. I don't think I'll go the hidden text route, I suppose I'll have to concentrate more in keyword-rich backlinks and keyword-rich content.

Its hard to keep the text flowing nicely when you have to keep inserting keywords. But I suppose its a necessary evil.