SEO Tycoon

**Towhid** · 01-08-2009, 09:32 PM

I put all the css rules on my external css file on one line. I did this so that it looks all jumbled up and in this way discourage potential theives from stealing my css. The browsers still display my pages right but what I want to know is, will doing this be bad for SEO, or do search engines not look inside the external css file at all?

**wayfarer07** · 01-08-2009, 09:36 PM

"Potential Thieves"?? Where did you get the idea that CSS was valuable?
Anyway, it won't matter to search engines...

**Towhid** · 01-09-2009, 12:19 AM

I have stolen entire navigations and menus in the past (not something I'm proud of). To make the navigation rollovers to work I needed the corresponding css which I was easily able to scrap by saving the html page and therefore getting the css file also. Then I would just isolate the css rules for the menu I wanted to steal and copy paste just that to my page. And with firefox's media tab (in page info) stealing the images is also very easy.

I know just jumbling my css rules won't make it impossible (or even difficult) to prevent theft but just a little more discouraging.

Anyway thanks for your answer, does anyone else know if it won't matter or not?

**psylocke** · 01-09-2009, 01:25 AM

Maybe this article may help. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/s...s-of-css/2211/

**VirtuosiMedia** · 01-09-2009, 04:15 AM

It will NOT affect your SEO, but it will affect two things: download size and maintainability. Your download size will be smaller by a few bytes and it will make the CSS harder to maintain if you want to make changes.