I don't have a DP account, so I'll post this here.

First off, there are only two ways Google would be able to tell whether you are using CSS to hide information:

One, they spider the page with a CSS-enabled bot, scrape the visible content and do a word count, and then spider the page a second time with CSS-disabled bot, scrape the visible content, and do another word count, and finally do a word-count-comparison.

Or...

They simply read the external CSS file, which would take a heck of a lot less work, processing power, bandwidth, etc.

The problem with the second option is almost as great as the first. There are *many* differrent techniques that can be used to hide content, whether for good or for evil. Display: none is easy, but what about using text-indent and overflow: hidden? Or simply including an extra span, and then placing the span *over* the content? Or zeroing out the height of the element? Etc., etc., etc., and so on and so forth. And again, these techniques can be used to deliver a much more user-rich experience, or to try and trick a search-engine.

Either way, I don't think Google is dumb enough to start penalizing sites based on their CSS techniques alone. More likely, they can just continue to ignore the CSS files, and concentrate instead on the content of the page. Too much hidden content is going to raise a keyword-spamming flag, since the content is still there on the page. Pages that don't raise such a flag may get included, only to be reported using Google's "Report a Spam Result" page.

In short, though CSS *might* be used to game the search engines, it can't be used to stop a site from being penalized, excluded, etc., due to the regular spam-result detection Google is constantly working to improve.

Is this a problem ? Just forbid Google to access your CSS files with the robot.txt :-)

As an honest question, is there anyting in place (TOS, etc.) that prevents Google from simply changing their policy and ignoring the robots.txt file for CSS exclusions (or entirely)?

Type in the following in Google:

cache:www.samhastings.com

I'm not trying to self-promote here, just to make a point. My site's presentation is controlled ONE HUNDRED PERCENT with CSS. If Google didn't look at my CSS file, you wouldn't see my homepage presented as it is. It would be a plain text page with a few images chucked in.

Now would anyone, having seen this, like to say that Google doesn't look at CSS files?

Sam

I saw a few hits from Googlebot on css files when I was first setting up my site, but never since then, so if it is fetching them, it's lying about its identity.

Regarding Sam's claim, the cache still contains the original links to the stylesheets on your own server, and loads the styles from there. If you delete the stylesheet from your server, the google cache will look horrible too. Google doesn't cache stylesheets.

Can someone explain this cache?
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:a7K98LYwSKsJ:www.bravenet.com/

google certainly reads css files, otherwise people will fill it with h1, h2 tags and then make it appear as normal text through css to fool the google.

Of course Google reads external CSS files. Matt Cutts talks about this openly when he says not to cloak content with z-index values.

Most people use external CSS nowadays to style their sites and therefore from this we can work out that Google can work these tricks out from sites and therefore mark them down for such tricks.

Thanks,

Jason
www.flexewebs.com

They do this since June:
http://www.thomasbindl.com/blog/index.php?title=googlebot_fetches_external_css_file

why sometimes in serp results its showing cache result of my site but when i am trying it in toolbar option it's not showing any result?