Does search engine read css file?

Question

I found comments like this in top of many css files on many websites

/*

Theme Name: CSSnewbie V2
Theme URI: http://www.cssnewbie.com
Description: Second version of CSSnewbie, based on Carrington theme by Crowd Favorite, designed by Jeremy Harrington of Crawlspace|Media, and developed by Rob Glazebrook.
Version: 1.0.1
Author: Rob L Glazebrook
Author URI: http://www.cssnewbie.com
Tags: widgets, customizable, 3-column


*/

My question is does search engines read css file. What is the benefit to add url, Tags etc in css file. is it beneficial for SEO?

Answer 1

CSS will not affect your ranking in any way.

Answer 2

My question is does search engines read css file.

Generally not (although some probably read them as part of automated tests to compare what a "normal" browser would render compared to what data their bots get given).

What is the benefit to add url, Tags etc in css file.

So the maintainer knows what the stylesheet is for.

is it beneficial for SEO?

No. Most things are not beneficial for SEO.

Answer 3

Some search engines do read the CSS files, but there is no use in pasting links in comments. They just get ignored or sometimes your page even gets lower ranked (at least google does this when your page has too many hidden links in comments).

Best wishes,
Fabian

Answer 4

here is an interesting article about that.

Google has a hard enough time now dealing with html/xhtml. Parsing CSS files and determining whether something is hidden or not is not a solution. Now the bot would need to determine why that CSS exists. There are many valid uses of display:none or display:hidden.For those who may be hiding things through CSS or negatively positioning content off screen to manipulate page content, I surely wouldn’t do that with any long term projects.

Answer 5

Yes, search engines read CSS, to prevent people from hiding portions of their pages using css, ans skewing the results (for example, keywords on a hidden <h1>).
However, why do you assume that has something to do with it? It looks like a signature and documentation, not like something SEO oriented.

Answer 6

Try searching for '"designed by Jeremy Harrington of Crawlspace"' and you will get no hits for the phrase (apart from a hit for this article, of course ...). I cannot imagine why a search engine would want to index comments in CSS files.

I think the purpose of these comments is self-promotion by web designers, and ... documentation.

Answer 7

Remember that every character you type in your css/html files is a byte transferred to the client and slows down page performance (at least until object is cached).

Therefore, I try to write the minimum necessary in the comments of the css/html and of course don't write fancy headers with lots of spaces and *****.

(I know it doesn't entirely answer your question, but it's another point for why removing the comments is better)