Google, and CSS

With the talk that Google does not even look at CSS stylesheets, How does it know the style of text?
So if you apply a style, how does Google know if the link is underlined? if a word is bold, font size compared to the rest of the text?
Should I really use CSS for styling?

 

I use CSS and the formatting doesn't show up in the "cached" copy of my page. This would lead me to believe that Google isn't reading it.

 

That's no good.
I know that onpage factors aren't that important, but still
I am learning html, I made a new template in Frontpage 2003, I reviewed the code, applied css to cut the code down a lot and removed a lot if not all html styling using mainly css.

If I rank #1+2 for all my main keywords is it worth the risk? or is there any risk?

Can anyone using only css for styling tell me if their sites do well?
Or if anyone did a site change that moved to only css did it have any affect?

 

-This seems quite strange. I runa number of sites and never faced this problem. The public copy and Google-cache seems same to me. Check this site of mine - http://www.dvdvcdplaza.com and
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=cache:IMuULE5fG34J:www.dvdvcdplaza.com/+dvdvcdplaza&hl=en

Also in one of the cases I know, a SEO programmer used layer.visibility=hidden through CSS, and used some keyword stuffing there. Immediete result, the site was penalized.

 

I should have noted that I am using an "External" style sheet.

 

They are just as important now as they were before - if you have two pages from competitive sites and one has good on page factors the other not but both have similar off page then the on page will win. The point being that you do not "know" the "weight" of the off page factors or for that matter the balance between off and on - so on page matters a lot - I start with that and then apply the off page factors.

If you are concerned that Google will not pick up important factors, such as h1,b then leave those in the html. Underline and font size can be placed in the css, wherever the code is, on or off the page - having the css on a separate [that does not mean external in this context] is a bandwidth/loading speed consideration. Personally, I always place the h1 tags first line of page only on the page, I always take out the underline by css and if I want to use b "too much" then I use css.

On the basis of the above you can see a page here (look at the cache by doing a search), Ski France, that started as HTML was converted to lower case and then to use css and then converted to php - it does rather well out of 5,460,000 and the changes did not matter a jot, mistakes and all [that I have just seen!]. What is important though if you go and look at yahoo, msn and the new msn you will see that it is across the board. Also, the secondary keyword phrases rank well with 20, 2 + 3 KWPs in the top 10.

 

before css
<B><A href="http://www.mydomain.com/touch_up_paint.asp">
<FONT color="navy" face="Arial" size="2">Touch Up Paint

</FONT></A></b>


after css applied
<A class="nav" href="http://www.mydomain.com/touch_up_paint.asp">
Touch Up Paint</A>

with a.nav {color: navy; font-weight: bold} set in my external style sheet.

Which one appears to have better on page factors?

 

What would be classed as too much BOLD text?

h1 tags.....I've had this mentioned to me before...but what are they and why are they important for SE.

Ian

 

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=h1+tags
H1 means "Heading One" It goes on the top where the heading goes. It tells your Browser and Search engines that this line of text is the main heading for this site or page.
Normally H1 tags should only be used once in your site. There are H1-H6 levels of headings. It means very little to have, but don't abuse it because it won't get you to far ahead. Blackhat SEO's are way smarter than that.
So if every other word on a page is bold I'd imagine that too much has been bolded. If it looks funny on the page than you may have too much bold. Your surfers may not want to see a funny looking site.

 

Thanks...ginostylz

After various searches I found the plain and simple meaning of H1 tags.....i.e. the same as what you said.

I've tested H1 on the first line of www.casaelbosque.com - but it makes the line spacing too much. How do you get round this?

i.e.Welcome to Casa El Bosque is changed to Welcome to Casa El Bosque andalucia accommodation within H1 tag

The next line starts High quali........

BUT the High quali........ line is quite a way down, have tried putting in table etc to no avail.

Ian

Ian

 

You shall be able to change all aspects of H1 as suits your needs, via the external stylesheet.

 

I use an external sheet and I've never come across this. My page is entirely formatted using div tags.

see the cache of my site - http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:...ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

 

This is where CSS starts to come into its own SEO wise.
You can define the font, size, color and line spacing in CSS for H1 and the H1 tag will appear as you want it to. Then you have the advantages of an H1 tag and the appearance just as you want it.

Another advantage, if later on you decide to modify your H1 style you simple make the changes in your external stylesheet and they are reflected site wide.

 

Back to coding for me.

 

I would write it for SEO [normally only in navigation] like this:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/touch_up_paint.asp" class="nav">
<b>Touch Up Paint</b></a>

a.nav {color: navy;}

and where I wanted other bold, as well described above, I would use

whatever appropriate css needed.

 

I checked my code and it looks like the only time I have this problem is within a "Table." Does that sound familiar to anyone?

 

I use external stylesheets, but as part of my SEO effort, I leave Header Tags (H1, H2, H3) and Bold tags (bold, strong) in the page. I link to external stylesheets, and they do show the style in googles cache. In fact, my top banner on one site actually shows up on top of the google table that talks about the cache because of css: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://www.ovenbuns.com
<<-- copied and pasted url from the google cache.

 

No not at all but you do have mistakes [sorry I'm short of time at the mo so I can't spend a long time]

From w3:

Note: a:hover MUST come after a:link and a:visited in the CSS definition in order to be effective!!

Note: a:active MUST come after a:hover in the CSS definition in order to be effective!!

And your style sheet:

a:active {
color:#6600FF;
}

a:hover {
text-decoration:underline;
color:#FF0000;
}

a:visited {
color:#990099;
}

 

With external stylesheets you can actually hide the text of h1 tags. It's bad practise though and I would assume this is something that Google are working at to irradicate.