Would this be considered spamming?

[andrewshim]

I looked through a website html recently and noticed that they had place individual keywords in <style> tags.

example :

<style>keyword 1</style>
<style>keyword 2</style>
<style>keyword 3</style>
<style>keyword 4</style>

I've never seen this done before.
What possible reasons for doing this?
Would this be considered spamming?

[tedster]

It does look like an attempt at hiding keywords, but I really doubt the content of a style element affects the algo, though. Google yawns and moves on, I think.

It might have worked in 1997 on AltaVists or Infoseek

[g1smd]

Spam, and probably giving the CSS parser and rendering engine in your browser a small headache too.

[StickyNote]

Was the style tags used to make the keywords
1) stand out, i.e. bold text,
2) no effect on font, or
3) render text invisible?

[tedster]

Content within a style element can only defines css rules - it doesn't get rendered itself. So even if there was an attempt here to do something or other with the rendering of those keywords, they would never be visible anyway.

Which brings up another possibility -- just uneducated html rather than a spam attempt.

[andrewshim]

Was the style tags used to make the keywords
1) stand out, i.e. bold text,
2) no effect on font, or
3) render text invisible?

No.

just uneducated html

Also no. The site's html is clean, well coded with some advanced DHTML.

I'm wondering if this somehow manipulates :

- keyword density
- code to text ratio
- adsense targetting.

[g1smd]

Stuff inside style tags should be completely ignored as being indexible content.

It should be just wasting bandwidth.

I'd like to think it attracts a penalty for trying too hard, and being stupid.

[StickyNote]

Content within a style element can only defines css rules

Yes sorry. Read 'style', thought 'span'.

My guess would be WYSIWYG coding with a bit of hand edited goofyness.