Forum Moderators: open
Is this normal?
There is nothing to stop you adding instructions to the robots.txt file to block CSS files, however, Google may either simply disregard such instructions or assume (rightly) that the block is to hide dubious code.
So, yes, I will let Google ('n all other bots) have at 'em, and just take my licks for my actions...
[edit] And I support whatever actions Google, et al, take against those who do spam/cheat the SEs with CSS [/edit]
I have a
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="Default Stylesheet" href="/style1.css">
statement in the <head> of every page.
Regards,
R.
I haven't seen yet that google is crawling css files, at least not in the last 1770 fetches in 4 weeks until today (or in the 136 fetches since last Sunday)
Maybe the Google people are just running a partial test?
It would sound logical to build a partial index to try out some new spam filters. Ofcourse I am just guessing here...
"but they cant do that because legitimate sites do it too" - however YOU do it also, and you are probably spamming, so yes, they WILL try to get rid of you .. eventually .. but im sure they are not just going to put "if someone uses display:none in CSS then BAN = TRUE" into the algo ..
however, they may well see that you have CSS black text on a HTML black background (the age old color matching spam) and give you the same penalty that the normal algo applies.
im sure (if they wanted to) that the people at google are smart enough to crawl your HTML and your CSS and work out exactly what you are using "display:none", "font-size" or "position" for .. if you have a class or element for your H1 that is resizing to 1px, then im sure you are stuffed .. they will work out what is used legit, and what is spam.
then again who says they are even looking to catch spammers anyway? as browsers and languages move forward it is just necessary to crawl these files as this is the way the web is going, and if they dont keep up, another engine will.
anyway, im sure if you use CSS / JS for legit purposes there is no way google will stuff you up for it.
oh but hey .. if they do, its their engine and they can cry if they want to.
Google fetched a css the first time at 06/Sep/2003.
However, only from 1 domain BUT from both subdomains (with and without www)
however, they may well see that you have CSS black text on a HTML black background (the age old color matching spam) and give you the same penalty that the normal algo applies.
im sure (if they wanted to) that the people at google are smart enough to crawl your HTML and your CSS and work out exactly what you are using "display:none", "font-size" or "position" for
That indeed would be some algo!... and pretty resource-intensive too!
About the only plausible item in that list that would be worthy of inspection IMO would be the font-size issue, there are too many context-sensitive scenarios that could apply to the others mentioned.
Cheerytron - why would this be considered spamming?
I wonder if the future is Google using OCR on human-browser loaded pages to get the text? Maybe not feasible now, but it may be the only way to zap spam down the line.
Whats the best way to report them?[google.com...]
Take spam reports with a grain of salt. IMO, they are hit and miss as what will get penalized for spam.
