Re: Search Engine CSSu

On Sat, 08 Jul 2006 11:04:31 +0300, David Woolley  
<david@djwhome.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>
>> What I suspect has been overlooked is his quite intentional
>> use of new values for the "media" attribute, and in
>> particular "spider" (though this could equally well be
>> "robot", or whatever).  Once one allows new values for
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> The other problem is that I don't know to what extent search engines
> currently parse CSS well enough to honour it; the main current benefit
> in parsing CSS is to prevent keyword stuffing in material made invisible
> in the style sheet.
>


That said, I believe partial ommisions of a document should be made  
possible instead of different versions which is always open to serious  
abuse like you have mentioned. (rel="no-index, no-follow" for elements in  
body?), for example, an author may not want a "lorem ipsum" paragraph  
example to dilute his content in a search-engine index, or may want to  
disable indexing of user comments, shoutbox content, etc. Different  
version being served is very much open to abuse, but ommisions could be  
encouraged, which would mean better search results on the long run.


-- 
Emrah BASKAYA
www.hesido.com

Received on Saturday, 8 July 2006 12:57:32 UTC