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google and display:none

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Jul 09.2005

I’ve heard google penalizes sites for using display:none.

This is a very useful design tool so google should be smart enough to simply ignore such content.

Just think of this accessibility thing:

<a id=’skipnav’ href=’#content’>skip navigation</a>
with the screen style a#skipnav {display:none}

If it does penalize sites then it’s doing a very stupid thing. But is it really doing that? There seem to be a lot of scare stories on blogs and stuff, but also people claiming googlebot doesn’t even look at the CSS.

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6 Comments(s) ↴

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@BluetagpizzaJul 09.2005 — I would think that the Googlebot reads CSS. Google search has that cached feature which seems to store everything but the images. Does it make a difference in ranking? I really couldn't tell you.
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@drhowarddrfineJul 09.2005 — Why would a search bot read the CSS? There is no content in it.
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@BluetagpizzaJul 09.2005 — True, there is no content CSS but it would be useful for filtering out all the "display:none" keyword spamming. My point was that if you look at the cached version of a now non-existent site in Google, you will see that the internal style sheet appears to be included (meaning the GoogleBot saved it for some odd reason).
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@amazing_andr3authorJul 10.2005 — My point was that if you look at the cached version of a now non-existent site in Google, you will see that the internal style sheet appears to be included (meaning the GoogleBot saved it for some odd reason).[/QUOTE] If you look at the cache, you will see a <base> tag, which means the CSS is a link relative to your site. I deleted the CSS on my site, cleared the browser cache, and then looked at the Google cache. It was not styled. Google does not seem to store the CSS, but of course that doesn't mean it doesn't read it.

My problem is that I have statistics for only 10 days (as I changed my traffic statistics system), otherwise I colud have seen whether Google has hit the CSS.

<edit>I think you could ban Google from the CSS files with robots.txt. What then?</edit>
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@togaenJul 12.2005 — I wrote them once and asked that because I had a site that used 'display:none' extensively... they refused to tell me :rolleyes: .
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@amazing_andr3authorJul 12.2005 — I have set myself an alert, so if googlebot visits the CSS i will get an email. Of course there's no way to tell if that is really googlebot, or something pretending to be googlebot. Or indeed googlebot could visit the CSS under a different name.

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that display:none has so many legitimate uses, that google has to be OK with it. Besides, there are other ways to hide content (placing something over it), that Googlebot cannot possibly discover without parsing and applying the CSS, which I'm sure would use too many system resources.

Now if you're hiding a huge chunk of text, or if you're hiding a keywords list and someone reports you to google ( http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html ), then perhaps a human will check the page and ban you.

So I think that if you don't use display:none, or other CSS hiding techniques to spam search engines, then you have nothing to fear.
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