Googlebot Reading CSS?
By Benj Arriola - Posted on Fri Jan 12, 2007Matt Cutts has mentioned already shared his thoughts blog about hidden content using CSS and pointed out several sites in the past, and CSS hiding of text to increasing ranking should not be done. With various techniques of doing that, it looks like Googlebot has been recently reported to be reading CSS files as first reported by Pierre Far, could it be searching for hidden text using display:none? negative letter spacing? negative absolute page positioning? overflow:hidden? We really don’t know. I looked further into the story just to have a closer inspection. I had some questions and has a few answers found from his site. Here is the line in the raw access log he had:
66.249.72.52 - - [24/Oct/2006:17:17:35 -0500] “GET /global/x.css HTTP/1.1″ 200 8382 “-†“Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)â€
- Is his css file excluded by robots.txt?
Pierre answered no. And many mention not to, since it might just serve as a flag you are hiding something. - Is the IP address from Google and not someone trying to pose as Googlebot?
Yes the IP is from Google. Thinking of all the possibilities this can happen, this can be a person posing as Googlebot but is located inside Googleplex? *LOL* Just thinking of all possibilities, hey you never know. It can be any employee using a fake user agent, but I find that funny, but can still be true unless already proven false. - Could it be Google Cache displaying the page?
Two people suggested that on Pierre’s blog. But still no proof of that unless someone from Google will explain. - Could it be Google Code Search?
Maybe, we don’t know either. But that is possible too. - Maybe he has a site or someone has a site with an anchor tag linked to it?
Maybe not, I tried all methods of backlink checking on the css file. I could not find any. - Maybe he’s lying?
Well there is a possibility he is unless proven not. But this guy does not seem to be that type of person. This site gets crawled pretty often, so i checked my raw logs files and didn’t find any. But also reported before, I remember reading on SERoundtable, where Googlebot was seen filling up a form and submitted it. But it never occurred to me also. At least from what I have only monitored and I do not look at my raw access logs everyday. But I think Pierre is a smart guy and I think he is not faking this.
Now true or not, I guess the bottom line is still not hide text. But in my personal opinion, if Google is doing this, there should be some manual intervention. Sometimes dHTML scripts, Scriptaculous stuff, some CMS and other effects can have text really hidden and come out when needed but were made with no intentions of hiding text for SEO purposes.
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