absolute positioning

css tricks are considered spam

[guiona]

I've heard that Google staff considers css absolute positioning as spam tricks and penalizes sites for using them. Is this true?

[Brett_Tabke]

only if it is hand checked and a eggregious serious problem is found - there is no way to catch it otherwise.

8 billion pages in the index. 2000 employees (about 200 of those directly involved in hands-on-organic search).

Those are good odds.

[suidas]

There seem to be two things you could do with CSS positioning tricks:

(1) Reorder content. In general, this is most useful for chrome/content. But--correct me if I'm wrong--Google attempts to perceive chrome, and factor it out. If so, this wouldn't help much.
(2) Same-color hiding. Instead of putting blue keyword-rich text in a blue box (which could be detected without imaging the page), you put them far away from each other and move them together with CSS.

Neither seems very difficult to screen for, particularly if you use page imaging. The odds can be diminished by a tiered warning system.

First, pages that might be doing it are identified. Some ideas: (a) pages with CSS positioning, (b) pages that use CSS mostly for positioning, ie., the person isn't a CSS-nut, but a dabbler, (c) valuable commonly-spammed keywords.

Second, you image the page and look at the color behind text sections. This requires processing power, but it's not magic. Surely Google uses some imaging.

Third, if necessary, personal screeners.

Lastly, if this becomes a major strategy, Google *will* begin to penalize for it. It would not be the first time that a useful web technology drew action because it could be abused. See pop-ups, cloaking, etc.

Google should add a "report spam" button to their toolbar. Of course, Google would only take action if they agree. I think nasty competitors would be a nice way to keep people honest.

[Jack_Hughes]

I've heard that Google staff considers css absolute positioning as spam tricks and penalizes sites for using them.

We use CSS for layout exclusively. We don't abuse it. We don't put stuff in the page then hide it or whatever. It would be unfortunate if there is collateral damage from google trying to clean up the spammers.

Pure CSS pages seriously rock. No more days trying to figure out which table is causing your layout to blow up.

[Critter]

Css is unbelievable easy to parse, and algorithms to do color comparisons as well as boundry overlaps are trivial--maybe a couple days coding tops.

Don't bet on getting away with it.

[Nikke]

I use css for absolute positioning, but I stay far away from hiding text and links by css color coding or "out-of-screen" positioning.

[crobb305]

Those are good odds.

Good odds for what? From those statistics, I assume you mean good odds AGAINST handchecks/manual penalty for css tricks.

C

[nuevojefe]

Don't bet on getting away with it.

I'll take that bet.

[nippi]

I have a site map on my home page.

Layer is the first content on the page. Its i positioend, and hidden at first, using css. Shows when user clicks on the bottom of the page link "sitemap"

I have, dobbed myself into google twice in the last 6 months.

Seems to be no problem(either the hidden at first, or the keyword rich, top positioned sitemap), and the page ranks well.