is print styling dangerous?

@media print {.blah {display: none;}}

[danny]

I never thought it'd happen to me, but I seem to have been hit by a Google penalty of some kind.

Looking back at changes I made that might explain this, one of the two prime candidates is my use of CSS print styling. I added
@media print {.menu, DL, .ad, .amazon, .amtop {display:none;}}
in order to hide menus, links to related pages, and links to amazon when pages are printed, on the grounds that they're not much use in that medium.

Could Google have interpreted this as an attempt to cloak the page or could Googlebot have decided it was a printer? Is anyone else doing anything like this?

[bull]

inline CSS or external CSS file?
Don't really think there is a hidden text filter at all, personally.

[sfxmystica]

GoogleBot looks at your website as a 'browser' ... It will 'see' the page as a text browser does. Common sense - why would it want to look at it from a printers view? :)

That apart, even if Google Algo analyses the CSS files, it definitely would have taken into considerations the various CSS media types.

So I think you can safely discard that assumption and look further.

[danny]

It's inline CSS. And yes, it did seem a bit unlikely an explanation, but it would be nice to have someone confirm that they are doing something similar without any problems.

The other (im)plausible explanation involves iframes with Amazon links. But maybe Google's just decided after five years that the internal linking of my site is too dense, though the site structure has hardly changed at all in that time.

[annej]

For a while I was using CSS to let people with old browsers know that they could better view the page with an updated browser. Teh message would only show on browsers that didn't support CSS. In the end I took it off. There aren't that many people on old browsers anymore and I feared that Google would see it as hidden text.

[danny]

Well, I'm leaving print-styling off until I get confirmation that it's not what's causing my problem. I can't imagine many people print my reviews, so it's not worth taking the risk.

I was so sure I'd never have to worry about Google penalties, but now I can see why people are so upset about them. I'm undoing all the tweaking I did in the last few months - with no clue at all what caused the problem, I have little choice.

[Powdork]

But maybe Google's just decided after five years that the internal linking of my site is too dense

I've never heard of that being a problem either. Although of late it seems to help to balance it with valid external linking as well. But even that gives you a plus for doing it rather than a penalty for not doing it.

[danny]

Well, it remains a mystery... The penalty, if that's what it is, seems to affect about a third of my reviews, maybe more, but with no pattern at all that I can discern. But that suggests it's not a problem with the print styling, anyway!