Sorry, I'm a novice so this is all a bit alien to me! I bought a premium WP template and the developer made some adjustments for me. They made the z index 9999999 to add a couple of features but when asking for help regarding a pop up shopping cart with somebody else, they said this was a very bad way to do coding. Is this correct? Does anyone know whether it will affect my SEO? Thanks
Sorry, I'm just trying to figure out whether having a large z index number is bad? The developer added this code to my site: @media screen and (min-width: 1024px) { .et_pb_row > .et_pb_column:nth-child(1), .et_pb_row > .et_pb_column:nth-child(3) { position: relative; top: -176px; z-index: 9999999999999999999999; } But somebody else told me this was ridiculous and the number should be no more than 3 digits. As I have no idea what any of this means, I don't know which person to trust or whether to go with a different developer...
Hi Michiko. The z-index html property specifies the stack order of an element. Let`s say you have two elements on top of each other. The one with the biggest z-index will be on top. Your coder probably put such a big z-index to be sure that your element will always be visible and not get overlaid by another element. Also you don`t have to worry about it, because it will not affect SEO in any way!
We all start somewhere... So you got scammed by nube predating sleazeballs... do go on. The ones who made the template, or third party? Not necessarily bad, though 9999999 is a bit of overkill when some early browsers top out at 32767 or 65535. Usually you want to leave SOME wiggle room so if you have more stuff you want to layer on top of that stuff you can. It's why I usually aim for 512 for the first time I use z-index and then divide and conquer down the line -- 256 or 768 for over/under, 128 and 384 for over/under 256, 640 and 896 for over/under 512, and so forth down the line -- basically allowing for 18 depth levels in any single direction, 1024 levels overall... which if you have elements nested deeper than that it's likely the HTML is ineptly coded rubbish. But BEFORE such a thing is resorted to code order and how positioned elements sort over normal ones should be leveraged FIRST. Normally later elememts depth sort over early ones, so a quick and easy way to have things overlap is to put them at the end -- relative or absolute elements sort over static ones, so that's first... only once you've expended what those can do should one resort to z-index. Generally speaking Search could give a flying purple fish about style -- they only trap a handful of things like visibility:hidden or display:none to try and prevent people from doing something called "content cloaking". That's a fancy term for "filling the page with keyword stuffed crap and then hiding it from visitors". Code order, plaintext and semantic markup are 99% of your on-site SEO. CSS, style, layout and scripts really shouldn't impact it... unless you're doing something stupid like using scripttardery to load content without a scripting off fallback. Though it's hard to say a whole lot without seeing the site in question... but an off the shelf stock template from one of the scam artist designer whorehouses like themeForest or templateMonster, slapped into one of the off the shelf systems like turdpress or Joomla can stunt the initial growth of a site for a few months or even years depending on how fast you fill it up with enough content. The garbage markup the ignorant fools calling themselves "designers" and systems like turdpress vomit up can really screw you over in the beginning -- but content is king and the more of it you have, the more unique it is, the sooner those types of failings will start to be ignored.