Does Google spider positioning and display in external CSS?

[irldonalb]

I'm aware that Google spider CSS files however I'd like to know what extent to they evaluate the contents of a stylesheet.

For example I position heading text off the page if I need to use an image for a heading. Another example would be sIFR hiding text in order to display the swf element.

Is the use of positioning and display in this way regarded spammy SEO and could/do Google penalize accordingly?

Thanks,

[tedster]

This topic comes up from time to time at conferences and on Google Groups. Google's John Mueller has regularly said that assistive coding such as sIFR is fine - as long as there is no attempt to switch out the visible content to something different than the text that's in the HTML.

Right now there's no algorithmic address to those positioning and display rules. I assume that Google spiders css files mostly for research and development purposes.

So it seems to be a manual inspection factor at present. But with the strides Google is making in OCR, the future certainly may be more automated.