Spiders parsing CSS

[dangerlarson]

First off - I do not intend to use the question below for any immoral purposes. As you can see from my sites listed in the sig., I am a white-hat guy.


I read that spiders do not parse CSS, so we use external stylesheets to remove bulk & to make more search-engine friendly.

I ALSO read that using "CSS tricks" to hide search engine relevant material would be caught, and Google would then penalize your site

Both can't be true, can they?

[Rincewind]

You miss understand what they mean by css tricks. Also they miss understand the benifit of the external style sheet.

Here is a CSS trick to hide content that could be considered as spamming by the search engines.

<div style="visibility:hidden;">
Lots of keyword rich text here that the SE will spider but won't mess up my nice clean page for the real people visitors.
</div>

That is, presenting the search engines with a different version of your page form what you present to normal folks is bad and if caught you will be dealt with.

Removing the CSS to an external file will help the SEO marginally, and every little helps. But the real benefits are in the design side where you can edit on CSS file to alter every page of your site. Also the CSS get cached by the browser so it's only downloaded once for use on say 10 or 100 pages. Saving you bandwidth and saving the end user some download time.

Putting the CSS in an external file won't "hide" if from the Spiders. They can still see it. They just choose to ignore it. Likewise if they see the CSS embeded in the html, they just ignore it and skip onwards to the real content.