Google and any other spiders do not look at a visual representation of
the site. As such they do not read or understand CSS[1]. What they do
look at (and really the only thing they care about at all) is the
source code of your site, and whether or not they can divine a
semantic map of the information you are setting forth from the text
elements in that code.
This starts, like a Christmas tree, with the star on top – the Title
tag. Contents of that tag should be closely paralleled by the contents
of the H1 tag, of which there can only be one per page. Any links to
that page should include one or more of the words in the title tag
within the text of the link itself, or the title tag of the link tag.
The paragraph of text immediately following the H1 in source code
order will be taken to be the most important paragraph on the page,
and should carefully support the subject matter in the title and h1
tags. (Note carefully that I have not said anything about META tags
etc – these are largely ignored any more by the search engines, and
are used only as a fallback in cases where the first paragraph is
either separated from its H1 or bears no resemblance to that tag.)
Each paragraph of text following the first is weighed less heavily in
the search engine’s “eyes”. You can influence the weighting of these
paragraphs by using additional header tags before each of them, in
descending order. You can, to some extent, override source order by
placing a higher level header before a lower-level header such as:
h1. Your header here
first paragraph
h2. Second most important header
second paragraph
h4. Lower level importance sub header
third paragraph
h3. Higher level importance sub header
fourth paragraph
… but this does not usually convey what you mean in an unambiguous
manner.
Now all this means that if you open up the source code view in your
browser, and start reading, you had better be able to make sense of
anything inside the BODY tag of your page when reading it as prose. If
you can’t, then you might need to re-think your design in order to
concentrate the text elements of your message in a coherent and
contiguous whole within a single element very near the top of the
source code order.
Freeway gives you powerful tools to manage this, by separating the
layout from the content in an easy to see tree graph in the Site pane.
Either toggle the little triangle left of your page name, or click the
header of the Site pane to change it over to Page view (showing
whatever page you were on when you clicked it).
Items at the top of the list are first in source code order. So move
your navigation down the list. Move your main text block to the top of
the list. If this affects the visual layout of your page (putting one
thing behind another) then find a way to satisfy your visual design
without compromising the order of your site’s text elements. Really,
that is the only thing that Google or any other Bot cares about at all.
Walter
- Google and other spiders do understand CSS to the extent that they
look out for tricks like white on white text, etc. But hidden in the
context of your navigation structure is just that – a visual style
within a declared navigation context. Besides this, any element that
repeats from page to page is discounted anyway in the context of your
page’s content graph, so you’re worrying about something that they
already forgot to read anyway!
On Nov 3, 2010, at 8:15 AM, alberto bevilacqua wrote:
The site is up since last June, I think it’s too much time even for
google… I’ve been told that the CSS menu generates the tag
“hidden” that can be the problem…
Thanks, David
Alberto
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