I just finished building a site for a long time client when he hit me with something out of the blue. He hired an SEO firm to go through the site and check it out. I basically just build the sites for him and he's never asked me about SEO so besides just making sure that the pages are clean and tight and there aren't any specific SEO negatives, I leave the rest (link building) up to him.
The woman from the firm got on the phone with me and started going over some things that frankly I had to disagree with, but I'm always open to learn new techniques and I will always admit when I'm wrong, so...
On the site (it's an online game site) I am using a CSS stylesheet to control the look and feel. The classes in the stylesheet are named things like "gameTitle", "gameCategory", etc. In the actual HTML, there are several items such as "<span class="gameTitle">THE TITLE</span>" and things like that.
The SEO gal told me that I should not use game keywords (such as gameTitle) in my CSS stylesheet or HTML because the search engines will see them as keyword stuffing; since there are so many of them they will negatively affect rankings.
I told her I think the SEs are smart enough to know the difference between CSS styles and keyword stuffing, but she disagreed.
Is she right? Do the names I choose for style classes affect the keyword density of a page?
That's an interesting question that I don't know an answer for right away.
bots do read the text in the 'class=' tag and maybe *some* search engines count all text, instead of only the visible/readable-for visitors part of the code but I personally doubt that it could be considered as keyword stuffing when it's in a css tag, I have seen some real blatant examples of keyword stuffing without those sites that carried it got penalized for it.
..but then again, I'm not sure as I have not seen any examples of a negative effect that doesn't mean there could not be one, but I doubt it.
Logically speaking, if the spiders see the tag, I would say that they would take it into consideration; it's not that much different from an alt tag, really. Just another use of code. But on that note, it would be SO easy to keyword stuff with CSS that I would assume that the spiders ignore it at this point, although I don't have any evidence either way.
I'm interested to find out what others have to say...
The SEO gal told me that I should not use game keywords (such as gameTitle) in my CSS stylesheet or HTML because the search engines will see them as keyword stuffing; since there are so many of them they will negatively affect rankings.
Depends on where they are whether Google sees them or not, but Google gives no weight to words that are part of the code and not rendered on the page.
They are not algorithmically factored at all.
True but Google uses many algorithms. We already discussed about Google's different algorithm for ranking and displaying results (truncating words).
Spam detection algorithm and ranking might be separated too. We still don't know what is used for keyword density analysis or keyword stuffing detection.
I believe they use one algorthim with many factors. I have no reason to believe otherwise.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MagicYoyo
We already discussed about Google's different algorithm for ranking and displaying results (truncating words).
Memory lapse on my part perhaps, where did this discussion take place?
Quote:
Originally Posted by MagicYoyo
Spam detection algorithm and ranking might be separated too. We still don't know what is used for keyword density analysis or keyword stuffing detection.
Two points here - One, Google indexes what is rendered. And, two, even if Google had nothing better to do than look at stylesheet names, I doubt they would consider descriptive naming as a form of "spam".
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