Has anybody noticed any evidence that google looks at or takes any notice of stylesheets. The reason I’m asking is; for ages its been excepted practice that google puts more relevants on content placed on the top of a web page. However with the growing popularity of css its so easy to manipulate positioning within a page, google is unlikely to let such an easy way of duping her go unnoticed (there are of course legitimate reason for moving things around with in a page) So either I’m not reading my server logs correctly and google is interested in my stylesheets or positioning no longer means anything to google, and by the same argument I wondering if h1 and h2 tags really mean anything as well Anyway please tell me your expert opinions on my theories before I go and mess up my search engine listings
There have been sightings of Googlebot fetching .css pages, but I've never seen any solid evidence that their automated ranking systems is analyzing the CSS code. Considering how often CSS is used to obscure keyword stuffing and other SPAMmy practices, it certainly doesn't seem that any of the search engines have any automated systems to detect CSS SPAMming. Considering that so many valuable functions on a page - from drop-down menus to pop-up messages - are controlled with CSS using attributes like display:hidden, its obviously going to be difficult to determine the webmaster's intent through any algorithm. My guess is that the best their system can do is to raise red flags to have a human check out the page. What really muddies the issue for me is that when I've seen a .css page in the index, the host server is misconfigured to identify the file's MIME type as text or HTML. It seems to me that the primary risk in abusing CSS isn't that Google will spot you, but that one of your competitors will see it and report you.
so that blows part of theory away, google does look at css not not consistently. What ever googles doing now i reckon there will be a day quite soon when google will start taking a good look at all stylesheets