Re: Search Engine CSSu

David Woolley wrote:

> Generally search engine operators strongly discourage the serving
> of special versions of pages to search engines.  They want to index
> the same material as the searcher will see, not some search engine
> attractive alternative.

Agreed.  But with which CSS medi{a|um} will the search engine identify
itself (if "all" is not used) : "screen", "print", "aural" ?
As the engine has no knowledge of the preferred medium, it would
have to accept all of these (and more, if they exist : "paged-media" ?).
I do take your point, but am not convinced things are as clear-cut
as they might be.

> The current search engine hinting generally has the effect of making
> the page less attractive to the search engine, or, if misused, less
> useful, whereas a search engine style sheet could result in an almost
> completely different visible content which adds in keyword stuffing
> in the search engine variant.

Yes, that is indeed a problem : visibility could be toggled on the
basis of the CSS medium identifier, which would be a Bad Thing ...

Philip Taylor