1

I often find site containing comments in CSS files like these:

/*
Copyright (c) 2009, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:
http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt
version: 2.8.0r4
*/

or

/* 
  Theme Name: FashionPress  
  Theme URL: http://theme-junkie.com/
  Description: A free theme for entertainment related blogs.
  Author: Roy Guan
  Author URI: http://theme-junkie.com/
  Version: 1.0
  Tags: Fixed Width, Adsense Ready, Widget Ready, Advanced Theme Options

    Changelog:
    v1.0 - 09/02/2008
    Initial Release
*/

I'm wondering if search engines actually read CSS files and these comments can provide some compelling SEO/SEM benefits.

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3 Answers

3

Short answer: Yes, they do and they likely ignore/skip comments.

Long answer: the comments you posted in your question, belongs to a WordPress theme. The file is effectively a CSS file, but WordPress requires the theme author to provide some special metadata as comments, including Theme Name, Tags and so forth.

WordPress will parse the metadata and display additional information in the theme switcher. In conclusion, the comments in the CSS file don't target search engines at all.

In general, Search Engines do read CSS file. This is because they need to verify the CSS styles in order to detect whether the webmaster is trying to use forbidden techniques such as hidden text in order to cheat the crawler.

You can easily check whether a crawler downloaded your CSS files simply searching your server log

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great answer :) – Rinzi♦ Jan 12 at 19:48
2

Yes, search engines can read (crawl) CSS files.

No, comments are ignored.

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good (short) answer :) +1 – Carlao Jan 9 at 10:43
-1

Comments, as do compilator for program (example:DevC++ for C/C++ language) are ignored by Search Engine

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