CSS & Proper SEO Links?

**bzimage** · 03-28-2007, 03:34 PM

CSS & Proper SEO Links?

Hi all, I have several sites, I will not mention the links here but I am using CSS to make advanced roll over menus. I was just wondering if in SEO terms that will affect the anchor text?

I have one PR 6 site which has this and yet the links don't get indexed in Google, I have many PR4s and they do not have CSS menus and they do... Is this a common SEO mistake?

Any help or guidance in this area would be appreciated

I wanted to see before I just changed em.

**Learning Newbie** · 03-28-2007, 04:09 PM

I think something else is the cause. Search engines have been aware of CSS for quite some time now, even read it well enough to detect hidden text ( same fore/back color ) done with CSS. So I'm certain applying a class to a hyperlink tag won't make the engine unable to parse that link.

Unless the tag is malformed and chokes the robot, but it seems you understand html well enough to not do that? I also think if that were the case most browsers wouldn't display your site properly.

**bzimage** · 03-28-2007, 04:11 PM

Site displays fine, and I never had a problem like this before. But as a PR6 I figured it would be indexing...

**chrishirst** · 03:16 AM

It definitely won't be CSS that is an issue. CSS is purely a means of styling, it cannot affect the textual content of the anchors.

As usual though ignore PR as a means of measuring anything, as you can see, it has already suggested you look down a wrong route.

How do you know the links are not indexed?
How old is the site?
Are there any good links pointing to the site or just link exchange and free directory ones ?

**bzimage** · 03-28-2007, 04:48 PM

Well, I haven't owned the domain that long, it was a 4 when I got it and I linked to it quite a bit.

The links are in a bullet list and the bullet list is what is styled with CSS.

**chrishirst** · 03-29-2007, 03:22 AM

Quote:

Well, I haven't owned the domain that long

Now this is the interesting bit, because I am not even remotely interested in what the PR is or what it was. BUT there is the school of thought that Google will "turn the clock back" when a hostname changes hands. This is NOT saying that this is the case here, just simply it is another point to consider.

To add to my questions;

Have you redesigned the site?
Have the URIs changed?
Does it use any rewriting techniques?

**bzimage** · 03-29-2007, 08:18 AM

I changed servers recently, I know that does have some affect. But I wish I knew how much

**chrishirst** · 03-29-2007, 11:14 AM

Quote:

But I wish I knew how much

None.

changing servers will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on crawling or ranking.

If it goes wrong and the site goes offline for two or three days, that may cause a glitch.

do we get some answers or is it still a guessing game ?

**bzimage** · 03-29-2007, 11:34 AM

No to all of your questions

only thing that happened was a changed server.

**willcode4beer** · 04-02-2007, 10:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

It definitely won't be CSS that is an issue. CSS is purely a means of styling, it cannot affect the textual content of the anchors.

Actually, with CSS2 we get the content property so, you can. However, like most standards its ignored by IE.
For example:

HTML Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3c.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Style Content</title>
<style type="text/css">
a {
        content: "boo";
}
a:before {
    content: "foo ";
}
a:after {
    content: " baz";
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<a href="http://google.com">bar</a>
</body>
</html>

will render
"foo boo baz" in Opera
"foo bar baz" in Firefox
"bar" in IE6 (I haven't tried 7)
Based on their relative compliance to the CSS2 spec.

When you add in the ability to hide text, set size and background images, you could fill in the gaps. So, CSS really does have the ability to change content now.
Of course, its mostly evil to do so