using display:none with css

[gellnsh]

Hello All,

I have a large number of links to optimized pages that I hide with the display:none; feature in my css file and I notice this technique doesn't seem to help or hurt my rankings so therefore I'm wondering if its even worth it? Does anyone have any opinions or advice on this technique??

thanks

[ran_dizolph]

As far as i understand, 'hiding' things on your pages can be viewed as spam by SE's, and thusly should be avoided.

Just my two cents.

[ADAM Web Design]

I wouldn't use that technique at all.

If you haven't been busted for black hat yet and you're ranking under a keyword or phrase, you will.

[Steve W]

display:none; may actuallly be invisible to SE's altogether as page elements rendered using that CSS are not read out by screen readers - which could explain why it neither hinders nor helps?

[Faglork]

Originally Posted by Steve W

display:none; may actuallly be invisible to SE's altogether as page elements rendered using that CSS are not read out by screen readers - which could explain why it neither hinders nor helps?

"rendered" ... for a spider, nothing gets rendered: A spider has no rendering engine to rely on, it just collects text.

So the SE's see it - at least when it is used in inline formatting.

I personally doubt that the spiders will see it if your CSS directory is protected by robots.txt ... but this is only speculation.

faglork

[Steve W]

Interesting point about using robots.txt to hide the css directory, I'd not heard of that before?

[Faglork]

Neither do I. It just occured to me that the spiders would have to access your CSS files directly in order to analize them for spammy code (let's for a moment assume they do). In that case, would the spiders obey a robots.txt which excludes them from the CSS directory? Anybody ever tried to verify this?

faglork