NaldzGraphics’s last blog post..10 Best Grunge Designs that Rocks

Do you remember if the research included HTML and CSS?

I understand how search engines could ascertain main content versus secondary content through a site’s table, tr and td structures; and, they probably do the same with CSS unordered lists. As for search engines “understanding” CSS relevance I’m not sure I agree. One could insert paid links into the main content and, through CSS, “remove” those links from the HTML flow and set them some other place on the page. However, search engines will parse the HTML and read those links as being part of the main content.

Why wouldn’t Google be able to assign relevance? It’s really not that hard. A couple years have gone by and I can’t find the link but a university released research showing how a search engine can tell what is the main content and what is the header, sidebar and so on. trust me, if they can do it, so can Google.

I have no doubt that this sort of behavior is something they would be pushing towards in the effort to battle paid links.

I’m more interested in when Google will assign CSS parsing to its algorithm(s) and how that will affect CSS use.

I read recently they were discounting links that were using on.click.

It seems logical as per your post that they will also start looking at linkage that you are in some way hiding, for instance linking though to naughty sites using dynamic javascript links or other forms of dynamic linking.

I’d love to know how many people they have working in the anti-spam division doing manual reviews.

I find it difficult to believe that Google will be able to identify headers, footers and sidebars unless the CSS semantically identifies them, e.g., div id=”footer”.

However, I could see Google attempting to identify and “read” server-side includes like Javascript’s document:write or PHP’s modules.

http://www.thedisneyblog.com/tdb/2007/01/the_disney_blog.html

Google has always looked at on-page presentation as the first step in determining relevance. With mroe people depending upon CSS, it behooves Google to learn as much about what people are doing as possible. Otherwise, their ranking algorithm will become lopsided, favoring unmodified on-page factors too much.

That would, in effect, open the door to a whole slew of new “pseudo-hidden text” abuses. I, for one, hope they are indeed looking closely at how pages should render through CSS, although that avenue has limits. For example, most CSS-dominated content is badly designed and the pages don’t render well when you look at the unmodified presentation.

What should Google do? Prefer the pretty-looking CSS side or the unmodified side?