Does google read external CSS files yet?

Just what the title says.. does anyone know if Google is reading external CSS files and processing them?

 

it does not

 

Sweet ..

 

Matt Cutt's talks about google cracking down on people using css for hidden text.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-unwise-comments/#comments

 

Are you sure about that? I know they didn't use to, but the reason I'm asking is that I had a site which received a hidden text penalty for adding urls that were in a DHTML menu with javascript. Google told me I had to remove the hidden text, and all my css is in an external file. I replied that the hidden text was an exact duplicate of what what in the dropdown menu (which they weren't following) but they never did respond. About 30 days after I removed the urls and placed a footer menu, I returned to #1 for a highly competitive keyword. I had been using the dropdown menu (with visibility:hidden) for about 4 years without any previous problems. My robots file is set to exclude the css file.

I guess they could have a system to detect hidden text (or even manipulated h1, h2 tags) without going into the css file.... so maybe that is what they did.

 

Well if I can't hide it with CSS how the hell am I supposed to get any kind of unique content on DB driven site... Google sucks

 

Using hidden text within a menu then using Javascript to display it depending upon what the user clicks is pretty standard imho. You must trade off what you might loose in penalties from Google with what you gain in site usability.
G keep telling us to design sites for users not for SEs. But their technology isn't upto handling a site designed purely for users.
I have a site that uses css hidden divs to generate a menu system and it works pretty well. As the site is now coming out of the sandbox, I'll be experimenting with changing the menu system to see whether there is a better way of doing the menu.
Menu's created with css tend to work pretty well because they degrade well and the site is normally usable with old non css browsers as well as modern graphical browsers.

But if Gbot doesn't load external css files, then it has absolutely no way of knowing if a block of text is hidden or not.

 

I find that a JS menu with some <noscript> tags to show plain text links works great for search engines.

 

Hmm, how do you think might that be possible? If Google can't see the CSS file, then it cannot know what size the h1 tags actually have.

 

I could look at your source code and tell if you were using css to control the size or color of your text without ever looking at an attached css file, so I am guessing google is smart enough to figure how to teach a robot to do it.

 

You can't tell from source exactly what is being controlled with css (assuming that the webmaster isn't using inline styles). You absolutely have to open the external css file to stand any chance of seeing what is being done.
Google might be smart, but they're not phsycic. They bot has to be able to read the file to see what is being done.

 

Sure you can. Is there a .css include at the top of the html? That's the first hint, and all you really need to.

I'd say that if google isn't reading CSS yet, it probably will eventually.

 

Is google spidering css files though? has anybody seen this in the server logs?

 

I'd still like a definitive answer.. if anyone has actually done some kind of test...

 

ehhhh. And that tells you what I'm controlling via css does it.
NO it does not.
There are hundreds of different things I could be setting via css.
Unless you (or rather Gbot) read the css then you've no idea what I'm controlling with css.
You can see what elements I've added ids or classes to, but without looking at the external file you've no idea exactly what I'm doing within those ids/classes.

I agree that Gbot will eventually start checking css files, but at the moment it doesn't seem to be and so long as you're using external css files Gbot is blind to what your doing with the css.

 

If you look at the CSS file and you see entries like:

.h1 { }
.h2 { }

(or however it looks) ... isn't that a pretty big hint, that if you see h1 on a page its gonna like like .h1 tells it too?

 

I chekced some of my logs and googlebot haven't grabbed any css files yet.

 

I know msn does, but not all the time. I have never seen google do it, but I have seen them (google), grab javascript files. That was happening in early June of this year. Then I never saw it happen again.

jb

 

L, that's exactly the point. YOU HAVE TO LOOK IN THE CSS FILE - you can see the location of the css file from within the source html of the page, but you cannot see it's contents.
Gbot isn't looking in the css files therefore it cannot know what is being done within said css file.

 

I thought that was the original qusetion, though. If google reads that CSS file. My point was - if not now, eventually. We arrive at the same point from different perspectives, I think