> p.s., ivb, don't flatter yourself. I have an 8 year old Russian

You guys crack me up. Igor, I'll never say my website design is
perfect, but the team and I know a lick of CSS, yes. I'm not scared to
post the url for competition purposes if that's what you are getting
at, it's free for them to look at anytime anyway and I know they do
considering the number of features we have that have been copied :)

Craig, I'm with you on the intent thing, I just think it is actually
really hard for google to spot intent and I know when googlebot makes
mistakes it can be painful... I think making guidelines like these
make it even harder for webmasters who do land in the doghouse to know
what to fix and what not to fix. I should go add this to the
'suggestions for webmaster central post' though, as essentially my
problem is not with the guidelines but giving webmasters the
information they need to make the fixes they have to. Some kind of
information like 'googlebot might be having a problem with *list of
items*' would be perfect - hey I can engage in wishful thinking
right? :)

Sam, I am glad your team knows CSS!
How do you guys make money?
I see no advertising programs, just some affiliate stuff, that I do
not think people buy anyway.

Igor

On Jun 8, 5:32 pm, Sam I Am wrote:

We get paid to post on forums like this. Don't you? :)

On Jun 8, 10:52 am, ivb wrote:

Yeap! There was LP then came B&A followed by TF!

On Jun 8, 9:47 pm, Sam I Am wrote:

Hi folks--

Just wanted to let you know that I asked Matt about this at SMX last
week (I'm a big fan of accessibility and image replacement, so I was
curious about some of the same things you've brought up in this
thread). Craig is correct in saying that your intent (in hiding text,
or in using any technique that has the potential to be abused) is
important. If your intent in hiding text is to deceive the search
engines, we frown on that; if your intent is purely to improve the
visual user experience (e.g. by replacing some text with a fancier
image of that same text), you don't need to worry.

Of course, as with many techniques, there are shades of gray between
"this is clearly deceptive and wrong" and "this is perfectly
acceptable". Matt did say that hiding text moves you a step further
towards the gray area. But if you're running a perfectly legitimate
site, you don't need to worry about it. If, on the other hand, your
site already exhibits a bunch of other semi-shady techniques, hidden
text starts to look like one more item on that list. It's like how 1
grain of sand isn't noticeable, but many grains together start to look
like a beach.

As the Guidelines say, focus on intent. If you're using CSS techniques
purely to improve your users' experience and/or accessibility, you
shouldn't need to worry. One good way to keep it on the up-and-up (if
you're replacing text w/ images) is to make sure the text you're
hiding is being replaced by an image with the exact same text.

I think that is where most people run into trouble, just as Danny (Not
of Gilbert &) Sullivan did when his site got somewhat erroneously
picked apart in another forum.

One problem with all replacement or many advanced DHTML techniques in
general is keeping the on-page code and the replacement content in
sync and up to date.

Me being lazy, I tend to avoid such techniques but then again, I like
boring-as-a-mud-fence web sites more out of self defense than as a
fashion statement.  :-()

Craig

P.s. Thanks for dropping by on this one Susan, I can understand why
Googlers don't comment on every post as 99.9999% of them are the same
but it is good to see your input on unique matters like this that come
up from time to time.  Consider this one bookmarked!!  :-)

Hi Susan

Out of curiosity, how is intent determined algorithmically? Given that
Google isn't going to hand-evaluate each flagged site, does this mean
that if the algorythm sees enough grains of sand that then there may
be some penalty?

Rgds
Richard

On Jun 11, 6:19 am, Susan Moskwa wrote:

Hi Richard
This is just my wild guess, but my guess is that you have to look at
the larger picture. As Susan said, "many grains of sand" ... assume
every grain of sand is a signal that is sent by your website. CSS
image replacement is just a tiny bit more than hiding content on your
page (except that the place where the hidden content should be is
filled with an image or similar). Hidden content through CSS is mostly
easy to recognize algorithmically. That's a grain of sand. If you're
replacing headers, that's probably another grain of sand (aka
"signal"). If your javascript does strange redirects, that's some
more, if your pages uses 10 lines of alt-text for a 1x1 pixel image
that's probably some more.

If you have enough grains of sand, if the Googlebot brings his beach-
towel when visiting your site, then chances are you've either gone too
far or things are being misinterpreted.

My guess is that there is a threshold of "sand" that brings a site
into a queue for a manual review. This is where intent and replacing
content with the same content in an image comes along. If things look
good, no problem, your personal threshold might get adjusted or things
might get updated in the algorithm, etc. This kind of review is
probably rare and I bet the queue is pretty long.

However, there is likely also a threshold where the Googlebot brings a
bulldozer instead of a beach-towel. That much sand just can't be an
accident. With that many signals being sent, it can be assumed that
the site is in fact doing something wrong on purpose (and I bet most
of the time they're right). These sites are likely to be penalized
automatically.

It's a bit like my email spam-filter works: it assigns a score based
on many, many rules. Below a certain number is ok, within a range
slightly above it's placed in a check-these queue, with a score way
above that it's automatically discarded.

I'll assume that the automatic penalties are pretty much ok, if you
have that many spam-signals in your site, then you're either doing a
whole lot of things wrong on accident or you're doing it on purpose.
The middle range is a bit harder: are they penalized with a pseudo-
penalty or are they really manually queued?

Also, which kind of items cause how many grains of sand? Hiding text
with CSS? Content duplicated from other sites? Sneaky javascript?
Stuffed headers? Link-exchanges? Links to strange sites? Interesting
things!!

John

Sam,

I don't think you have anything to worry about with regard to intent,
but there are a couple of things that you might want to consider...

You might avoid a "grain of sand" if you don't give the spans in your
menu a class of "hidden", that's got to ring some alarm bells
somewhere. You don't need a class there at all, just apply your css to

#primary_navigation span, #navigation_search span { ...rules in
here... }

You should also be aware that using display:none for this text can
cause problems for screen reader users. Not only do regular browsers
not show the text (which is what you want), many screen readers don't
read it out either (which isn't). If you only want to hide text
visually, but still get it read out, use absolute positioning to
"display" the text somewhere off the screen, say at top:-9999px .
http://www.google.com/search?q=screen+reader+display+none will find
plenty of stuff on this issue.

i had a page that i could not get fully indexed for months until i
noticed in the CSS it had a -50px for one of its many layers. I fixed
it to remove the negative and a week later it was fully indexed and
remains so. My view is that any negative in CSS either for images or
layers will be attract a negative score in google.

Hmm... Strange, yes. So you believe the signals from the CSS files are
processed and reacted upon automatically? That would be interesting.
(understatement of the day :-))

Did Google crawl your CSS file in that timeframe (assuming you have an
external stylesheet)?

CSS files can be so complicated with regards to that crazy "cascading"
-- a tiny change in the (x)HTML page could move contents into a
completely different style, relative values get mixed with absolute
values and who knows how many browser dependent hacks even exist and
how they in turn cascade. I don't even want to mention Javascript or
different output media, lol. Is hiding content for mobile browsers a
bad thing?

All these things would make it very problematic to react to CSS files
automatically.

You wouldn't want to change that to -50px again, would you? just to
see what happens :-). Afterwards you can change it back to
+9999px :-))

John