DIV's, SPAN's and Google

Does Google ignore <DIV> text now that a spam technique has been found?

[hiker_jjw]

In an old/previous thread, someone found a site that was using a <DIV> statement along with a Style Sheet (CSS) in order to hide content from Web users. The content was positioned off of the viewable page. I don't want to get into the details of the spam, but I am worried about it's effect on the Google algorithim. BTW, I believe the site was reported to Google... so it's fairly obvious that Google now know's about it.

At the moment, I'm contemplating rewriting some of my HTML to "not use" <DIV> statements because I'm afraid that it may have a negative effect on my site's SERPS.

Questions that I hope someone can answer:

1.) Does Google ignore content within a <DIV></DIV> statement?

2.) Does Google ignore content within a <SPAN></SPAN> statement?

3.) Does Google ignore content with CLASS attributes? I'm certain Google can not ignore base Elements of a style since no attribute is necessary, but what about CLASS'es that require the use of an attribute in the HTML?

Thanks in advance for all the answers and/or opinions.

Cheers

[ikbenhet1]

1)No
2)No
3)No

[piskie]

I agree.

1) No
2) No
3) No

In fact I spend a lot of hours removing tables in favour of divs and css saving masses of code bloat.

[mivox]

Google would lose probably 80-90% of the content in any CSS layout it spidered if it tried excluding such broad areas of content.

Pretty much 100% of the content on any site I've built recently is contained in <div> tags...

[bcc1234]

Well, what's the point of removing divs and spans if you can apply a style with positioning to almost any other tag as well.

They would have to ban html then :)

[hiker_jjw]

Thinking about this again... since Google seems to "like" smaller pages, it should like the concepts behind using CSS with DIV, SPAN, etc.

Here's a quote from a high ranking SEO site that pulls a quote from Google:

We don't like hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css, or links that are inconspicuous or punctuation, for example.

It's the mention of DIVS in that quote that makes me wonder. I guess we'll find out after the update. Thanks again for the quick replies. I thought I was going to be up really late tonight.

[crash]

Your focusing on the wrong words.. "We don't like hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css..." they don't like hidden anything.

[pageoneresults]

> We don't like hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css, or links that are inconspicuous or punctuation, for example.

Sure would be nice to see where they specifically have that in writing. I can see where the /text in divs/ could be misconstrued. If that is posted by Google then it applies to any techniques that are being used to deceive and/or influence the SERP's.

[hiker_jjw]

Hey, now I see that...
It's so easy to jump to conclusions.
I just have to remember to chant my mantra:

"What would Google do?"
"What would Google do?"
"What would Google do?"
"What would Google do?"
"What would Google do?"
"What would Google do?"

Does Google have a cult following? Or, am I already participating in one here?

[msr986]

All you need to read is the first part of the statement.

>We don't like hidden links/text

Google doesn't like hidden links/text no matter how it's hidden.

If you have hidden text inside or outside of a div, you've got a problem.

[edit] (shocked after hitting the submit button) Wow, did we all jump in on that or what? [/edit]

[Hagstrom]

We don't like hidden links/text in divs/layers/iframes/css, or links that are inconspicuous or punctuation

Oh, bother! Now I have to remove all those commas and semicolons from my homepage.

[IanTurner]

I hope that was a joke Hagstrom ;)

[drako]

Does google actually read the content of an external
css style file. It has to be able to do this to know if a
link is visible or invisible in the browser.....or am I completely missing the point here?
If Google is able to read an external css style file
would it be spam to use keywords (for example name for a style) in the file?

[oLeon]

Iīve never seen Googlebot taking the external css-file - I only saw Scooter doing that.

Itīs very simple to detect hidden DIVs, because you have to code "visibility: hidden" - and that is easily to detect.
(Though it seems to be that pages with this kind of "spammy layers" are still in the index.)

[brotherhood of LAN]

Iīve never seen Googlebot taking the external css-file

I think that's about the bottom line or thereabouts. They don't "like" hidden text, in DIV's or whatever, because they have no surefire way of knowing if someone is doing it :) That's why they don't like it.

Until then it's probably up to someone to report the spam or the SE rep looking at/banning it.

[HarryM]

If Google doesn't access an external CSS file as oLeon suggests, then what is the best course on bold fonts?

My understanding is Google rates keywords in bold higher that ordinary text, but all my font attributes are set by an external CSS file. Would it be better to set bold by the old <b> tags?

And what happens with spammers who use external CSS to make text invisible by setting font colors the same as background colors? Does Google pick this up?

[startup]

HarryM,
Google-bot does ask for .css and .js files. Exactly what is done with them I don't know.
The use of attributes such as <b><i><strong> and <font size> are better off being used in html.

[HarryM]

Thanks Startup.

It seems I have some editing to do. :)

[ProfMoriarty]

> we don't like cloaking or sneaky redirects in any form, whether it be user agent/ip-based, or redirects through javascript, meta refreshes, 301/302's, or 100% frames

Well, thatīs a quite confusing statement. A 301 is used to inform the user-agent that the requested page has moved to a different location. How else should I inform google so that googlebot does not get a 404 and my pages are going to be dropped from the index?

Another question: How does Google define cloaking? Actually, Iīm converting all my pages to css layout without having netscape generation 4 in my mind. netscape 4 users will see the old table based layout all others will get the css based pages. In my opinion itīs the most userfriendly way as long as browsers not intrepeting DOM / CSS correctly are used. So - am I going to be bannend because of that?

Lars

[IanTurner]

Using the 301 to redirect the Googlebot to one place and other browsers to another would be considered out of order and liable to banning.

I don't know of any cases where someone has been banned for providing readability to their users, such as browser detection for IE/NS.

[hiker_jjw]

startup has some great points!

Let's not forget about the color attribute...

For example: <font size="+1" color="#00ff00">