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Do robots "see" classes in styles?

In an earlier post “seeing through the eyes of bots” Mike identifies that robots read certain tags like h1,h2,h3 etc…


Now I have been thinking about this for a while but if the bots read the tags – do they also read the tag classes to identify relevant content sections? So for example if you have a website for sandwich recipies you might set up your stylesheets like this:

<h1 class=“sandwich-recipes”>Sandwich Recipes</h1>
<h2 class=“sandwich-recipes cheese”>Classic Cheese Sandwich</h2>
<p class=“cheese-sandwich description”>
<strong>This is the recipe for a classic cheese sandwich</strong>
</p>
<p class="cheese-sandwich ingredients>
Bread and some cheese 
</p>

It’s a daft example – but you should understand what I’m getting at - basically you create a stylesheet taxonomy based on relevant keywords

SP


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michaelcyger [ Admin ]

I believe I understand where you’re going with this. I don’t know exactly how Google or other search engines exactly handle keywords within classes and CSS tags, but here’s my thinking:

  • All search engines care about content (the text on the page, the alt tag for pictures, etc.)
  • All search engines care about intent of the content authors (what’s highest on the page, what’s in the heading tags, what’s bold versus normal, etc.)
  • Search engines don’t really care what font-families, font-sizes, font colors (unless they blend with background), tables, columns, etc. you use on your web pages
Given these general rules, I’d say that search engines wouldn’t put much — if any — value in classes that were defined using keywords.

Could it hurt? I don’t think so. Could it help? Possibly. Will that take you a good amount of time to do? Yes. Will it be worth your time? I’m not sure anyone but a representative from the search engines can answer that question with 100% confidence. 

Would I do it? Because I’m not sure if creating CSS with keyword names would help, I’d probably spend my time on higher priority things, like keyword research, simplifying and cleaning up website dynamic page creation (move all JS to one page, great meta information, fixing my CSS, etc.), creating new pages geared just for new keyword phrases, and things like that.
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