Any Problems w/ Cascading Style Sheets

KW weight diminishing

[Garyh]

Trying to use Cascading Style Sheets and it would first appear that KW's appearing in the body are getting less weight.

Comments would be welcome of course.

[BoneHeadicus]

Are your style sheets external?

<link rel=stylesheet href="caint_touch_this.css" type="text/css">

Spidey wont pick those up whereas he might be able to comprehend inline styles which, if your colors are wrong, could affect you adversely.

[Garyh]

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="default.css">

Doctor, does this mean I won't be able to play the piano again? :)

[BoneHeadicus]

Keep an eye on it and let us know. General concensus is that external css does not affect ranking and can be used to format a page to optimize for the eyes as well as let spidey have the tags he likes.
It's a wonderful thang. :)

[skirril]

Of what I see from spiders, robots, they get:

- html files

perhaps images (until I forbade that).

They do not get stylesheets (mystyle.css), at least not the important, well-behaved robots.

Is there a way to abuse this info? - specify in the stylesheet that eg. h3 is text in background color, and thus invisible?- but will get spidered?

Skirril

[tedster]

Yes, there are lots of potential abuses of CSS to create text the spiders read but the normal visitor doesn't see. I'm sure the SEs are working on detecting this, and there have been some examples in recent months of spiders grabbing external css files.

Right now the most likely way for an abuser to be caught is not through automated spidering but through a complaint to the search engine from a competitior. Then a human may check the pages, verify the abuse and decide drop them from the database.

That's right now, at this moment. At any time, maybe tomorrow, any given engine may add something new to their algo and flush away what they consider to be another form of spam. It's best to be straightforward. Getting banned or buried is very painful.

[BoneHeadicus]

Tedster is right on

You should still make a reasonable page but css allows you to turn unsightly <h1>'s into size 4's and make that text in a blue <td> cell white with a white background and the spider will still see white background and black text. Use but dont abuse.