CSS Issue or not?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi Mozzers,

I am doing an audit for one of my clients and would like to know if actually the website I am dealing with has any issues when disabling CSS. So I installed Web developer google chrome extension which is great for disabling cookies, css...

When executing "Disable CSS", I can see most of the content of the page but what is weird is that in certain sections images appear in the middle of a sentence. Another image appears to be in the background in one of the internal link section(attached pic)

Since I am not an expert in CSS I am wondering if this represents a CSS issue, therefore a potential SEO issue? If yes why it can be an SEO issue?

Can you guys tell me what sort of CSS issues I should expect when disabling it? what should I look at? if content and nav bar are present or something else?

Thank you

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[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thank you John for your help!

[john4math]

The point I'm trying to make is that a CSS problem likely won't result in any huge changes in your SEO.  There's a CSS problem if you can visually see something positioned or sized incorrectly on your pages with CSS enabled, not disabled.

Search bots will do some CSS/Javascript rendering, but more towards seeing how large things are on the pages (& trying to find your headers), making sure you're not hiding text (setting text colors the same as background colors), and things of that nature.

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hey John,

So how can I judge if there is a CSS problem? Should I go through all the CSS code? Can you give me an example. A screenshot would help.

Thanks!

[john4math]

Not to identify anything in particular, it's just that's what the bots are reading and indexing.  The bots read the source of the page, and will attempt to do some CSS and javascript rendering, but they're not reading the page like it's seen within a browser.

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hey John,

I realized I never answered you sorry about that! Thanks for the help!

One quick question though: "If you want to see how a page looks to search bots, view the source of the page, don't disable the CSS."

View page of the source and identify what exactly?

Thanks John!

[john4math]

CSS positions things on the page, so if you remove it, it's not surprising that lots of elements overlap.  The page isn't going to look good.  This is nothing to worry about.

If you want to see how a page looks to search bots, view the source of the page, don't disable the CSS.