Hi! Can anybody tell me if my css affects my website SEO? For example, if I use the tag <b> but I use Css to change the style of this tags will I be penalized? I read that if I use "display:none" initially then the information inside that element will not be indexed. Is this correct? Thank you in advance.
It's the same if you use HTML or CSS for your tags. ONLY if you use rel="nofollow" inside <a></a> tag this link will be considered as nofollow and Google and other SE will NOT follow it. Also, only robots.txt can control what will be indexed and what should NOT be indexed!
CSS is a technique to provide a better design to your website, it does not have anything to do with the SEO. However, HTML tags need to be properly optimized because they are a great source and help in SEO. Do not try to be over smart when it comes to SEO, try to keep the website structure simple and try to keep proper navigation from every page. This will help you in SEO. A proper balance in Nofollow as well as dofollow tag is needed as well
So, does CSS influences or not? Here's my problem: I want to use bold because it's good for SEO but instead of having bold I want to use a different color and maybe a semi-bold font-weight. Can I be penalized for changing the <b> tag with css?
Css is used for better designs for your website. A better design will help you in returning visitors as professional designs are liked by users. And for the second line, No! it won't affect the seo
CSS affects SEO in many ways. SE robots read all the CSS's on a web page. "Bold" affects SE ranking of a page. It doesn't matter which methods you choose to make a word/words bold. Different color is also a sign of importance. Different color + bold is a sign of more importance than a single bold or a different color.
CSS indirectly affect SEO but you will not be penalised. The problem in using CSS is it make your site heavy and Google bot cannot read flash, Images or CSS Bot reads the text and content in HTML form. Its better you put CSS but you can even compress so that it helps in SEO purpose. Thanks
CSS is basically a style sheet which tells browsers how to display a web page. However in SEO it does not have any direct impact, but it can affect it as it affects your website. We do CSS optimization so that the loading time of a website reduces and if CSS is not properly optimized it can affect the load time of your site. And we are all aware of the fact that if a site does not open properly or takes more time to open then it reduces its visitors as a visitor does not want to waste his time on a site which takes much time. Thus reduction in traffic also affects in SEO of a website as search engines also consider traffic of a website for placing it on top.
WRONG! css does affect seo. If you use embedded css or javascript this is not seo best practice. you will want a positive code to content ratio in favor of text content. in addition, search engine spiders look for rich text, not code. when your webpage has lines and lines of css code it takes a search engine spider longer to crawl down to the rich text and if the search engine spiders needs to crawl too far down onto the page it could potentially cause that spider to leave your site without indexing your pages.
That's incorrect mate, try to view page with Lynx or any other text based browser. The only way CSS affect SEO would be if there are to many external CSS, which will slow the page, though I doubt that this have much weight in current algorithms. Watch one of the latest Google Webmasters Help video, on official Google channel.
According to me - CSS provides these benefits in your ongoing search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts: By separating content and presentation, you can very easily experiment with different copy and presentation (for example font, background color, etc.) and test what converts best Less time spent maintaining web sites frees up webmaster resources, helping you to implement more and fresher content, and more SEO/SEM strategies
I see you got plenty of answers. Just let me add a few things: CSS does affect SEO - and there are solid reasons for this! (1) you must separate content from design/coding and CSS is ideal for this - make sure your pages have a larger proportion of real content than code (I personally managed sites several years ago, which had no CSS, but WYSWYG coding - filled, mixed with content and that's terrible - Google hated that and downgraded that site, but implementing a good CSS helped recover!) (2) CSS influences a site's speed (good CSS helps speed up site!) - and site loading speed is very important nowadays - ranking factor! (I recommend you to use the Alexa Toolbar, which shows you the speed of the site compared to most websites - e.g. "Very Fast, 95 % of sites are slower") (3) put as many things into your CSS and leave the least possible coding in the page itself (thus, you can achieve points (1) and (2) easier) But: CSS (although vital), not the most important "heavy weight" factor in SEO. Most people will tell you, it won't influence SEO - but as I explained, it will! Don't worry about being penalized for CSS. From this point-of-view, you shouldn't worry. Focus on the visitor metrics, the site speed, off-site SEO and on-page content optimization as well...