Search Engines and Style Sheets

[Bill]

So far Alex I haven't heard anything that seems like a warning not to use complex style sheets. In the discussions I've heard, you have the people who emphasize the idea that spiders prefer simpler pages over complex pages (and who are arguing that complex stylesheets _might_ put off the spiders), and an equal group of people who use style sheets who are saying they see no sign of any negative impact, so why not use them.

You know that some people are using stylesheets to push large sections of keyword stuffed text off of the visible page. I've heard it said that google is aware of this and is thinking/has experimented with looking at stylesheets to detect this, under the "what the spider sees the surfer should see" premise. But google has been doing such a lousy job of dealing with spam in general, I highly doubt they are going to do anything about this kind of stylesheet trick anytime soon.