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Things to Avoid
Below are some things that should be avoided:
...Avoid Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading style sheets are not supported
by the search engine.
Anybody know why they'd be discouraging us from using CSS? If we were to avoid CSS completely, would those pages rank higher in Yahoo! Search results, all other things being equal?
My understanding is that CSS shouldn't pose any problem to indexing and relevancy calculations. Anyone know anything different?
css is the w3c recomendation..
CSS in an external stylesheet should have NO negative effect whatsoever. If done properly, external CSS should leave the HTML page cleaner and easier to spider than a 'regular' page.
Perhaps they're talking about when CSS styles are either stuffed in the <head> of the page, or actually embedded in the individual HTML tags... I cannot imagine how a proper external stylesheet could interfere with anything.
probably more Yahoo syle paranoia that you might use css to GAME YAHOO!
Why not? It's being used quite successfully to "game" Google.
hahaha, that's very funny. I suppose if that time ever comes we'll then be competing for best background colors and best arrangement of tables.
;)
I've seen Overture (and Infospider)'s most recent (March 1,2004) "Site Match Content Guidelines" posted on the internet, and there is absolutely no mention of style sheets in them.
In fact, I would not expect them to mention style sheets, since their central concern is with the sorts of content (and various "gimmicks" to try to fool search engines) that they wish to avoid.
[edited by: bruhaha at 8:04 pm (utc) on April 15, 2004]
First place to always look would be the authoritative resource. In this case, it is Overture...
Overture's Site Match™ Content Guidelines [content.overture.com]
First, it wasn't an email. Turns out the info comes from the Overture Site Match Center itself; the client just copied the stuff and sent it to me via email.
Second, you need to have an Overture Site Match account to access the page in question. Browse to [smc.sitematch.overture.com,...] then log in. (I'm assuming that one of you has such an account so you can verify what I'm reporting.)
Third, browse to the Good Content Guidelines page at [smc2.sitematch.overture.com...] The section containing the CSS advice is located almost at the bottom of the page. For your edification, here are the three techniques Overture (i.e., Yahoo!) advises their Site Match customers to avoid:
Things to Avoid
Below are some things that should be avoided:
1. Avoid using images as navigation links. Make navigation links text so the crawler can read the link content.
2. Avoid Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading style sheets are not supported by the search engine.
3. Avoid using affiliate IDs as part of the URL. Embedding an affiliate ID within a URL dilutes the link popularity of the actual URL and may therefore demote the ranking of the page. Each variation of the affiliate ID further dilutes the page's link popularity.
The page also contains a lot of specific information re optimizing for Site Match (i.e., Yahoo! Search) that I can't seem to find anywhere else online. (I tried finding specific phrases from this page in Google, Yahoo! Search, and Teoma. No dice. Talk about being part of the "deep web".)
Most of the info on this Good Content Guidelines page is well-known by the average SEO pro, but I don't know if some of the stuff Overture's advocating has ever been officially articulated by Yahoo!. For example, the same page recommends that data in the Keywords META tag be comma-delimited, that the TITLE tag be from 50-75 characters long, and the Description META tag be 200-250 characters long.
These recommendations fall within a section on the Good Content Guidelines page called "Guidelines", so you could argue that Yahoo! is only trying to help Site Match customers create search results that are stylistically effective. On the other hand, you could argue that they're giving up SEO specifics to their customers.
In any event, the fact that they're advocating not using CSS seems to cast any other recommendation on that page in poor light.
I look forward to one of you getting a hold of a Site Match account and verifying the things I'm reporting.
we had some questions come in about that as well, and thought no css? (now, that can't be right?)
LisaB
We have clients whose corporate id insist that they use 'graphics' for navigation in their corporate fonts. In other words, a top or side navigation which uses graphic 'rollovers' - still text but graphic text. We always put Alt tags on the graphic navigation in these cases.
Please tell me that pages which use 'graphic' navigation will be rejected?
I hope your editors undertaking the reviews also realise this :)
