Search Engine and Style Sheet

[laoloup]

I'm trying to learn if there's any relationship between search results and CSS. Do search engines care css at all or does css affect ranking in the SERPs? One example would be: we know that the <b>, <i> and such tags help with key word ranking. But if you achieve the effect using css, does it still help? Should you use H1 { color: blue } or just plain <H1><font color="blue">... instead? Or if you use Maintitle { color:blue }, do search engines know it's a title?

I'd appreciate it if you could point me to some pages regarding this topic.

[JohnW]

I don't believe there is any relationship between CSS and rankings per se, however using CSS does no damage and it may let you get away with a few things from time to time. I'm sorry but I don't know of any articles off hand. You might try a search of the forums for the keyword css.

[Marcia]

It stands to reason that <h1> is picked up simply because it's the HTML tag, regardless of whether styles are applied to it or not - the tag is the same. It's generally recommended that stylesheets be external and linked to, to keep the text higher up in the code to page text ratio. It makes for leaner code and smaller page file sizes, and certainly doesn't hurt rankings any.

Whether stylesheets are picked up by the engines is another story. They can be, and it was reported a few years back when AV was still an active crawling engine that they had been discovered to be fetching external stylesheets at one time.

>> point me to some pages regarding this topic.

Actually, articles on just about anything can be found by searching at our favorite search engine.

IMHO, it generally ends up more beneficial for everyone when topics are discussed right in the forum threads, to get a balance and more varied viewpoints - and sometimes the very latest of what's being seen. That's exactly how I found out about the stylesheets being fetched a few years back - in a forum discussion.

[JohnW]

Must have taken you a while to decide how to word that first sentence. Good job.

[laoloup]

Thanks for your guidance, John and Marcia. If I understand correctly, using <b>, <i> and so on should have a more direct effect on search engines than if they are embedded in the style sheet. In other words, search engines don't quite care the attributes of a style sheet except things like <h1>, which are html tags.

[JohnW]

My thoughts are, that you want to use CSS for all formatting however if you simply need to bold or emphasize a word or 2 (or a headline) here and there it may be better do that stuff in the html.