GoogleBot Crawls CSS Files

Cre8site Forums discussing a report by Ekstreme.com that CSS to hide text. It was also clearly stated by search engine representatives at SES in Chicago that it's a no-no to block crawling of your CSS or Javascript include files. The real question now becomes how pervasive this is going to become. Is Google going to start crawling everyone's CSS? Or are they simply going to trigger off of manual or algorithmic flags to do this for some sites? Or for that matter, are they going to start doing some random crawls of CSS on some sites as a spot check? In 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. The penalty for getting busted using this technique I would imagine is a permanent ban. No if's, and's, or but's, you're history. You'll need a pardon from the Governor to be reconsidered for inclusion. It may indeed be hard to algorithmically determine an illicit use of display:none or display:hidden, v.s. a legitimate one, but it certainly can be used as a flag. We need to remember that this all operates in the context of "trust", a topic that Matt McGee does an Ramblings about SEO blog. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic, Inc., the publisher of Custom Search Guide.