Toolset CSS is causing SEO and ranking issues

This support ticket is created 6 years, 7 months ago. There's a good chance that you are reading advice that it now obsolete.

This is the technical support forum for Toolset - a suite of plugins for developing WordPress sites without writing PHP.

Everyone can read this forum, but only Toolset clients can post in it. Toolset support works 6 days per week, 19 hours per day.

Tagged: Layouts plugin

This topic contains 1 reply, has 2 voices.

Last updated by Beda 6 years, 7 months ago.

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May 18, 2018 at 4:26 pm #901155

MichaelR9215

Hello,

I have been doing some research about why my websites aren't ranking as well as they should be, and I found out that Google is ranking a ton of keywords that do have any relevance to my websites. Google is crawling my code, and is reading all of the hidden CSS comments as the keywords I want to rank for, instead of all the other keywords on my page.

This is a major issue.

I did find another support ticket that included a solution someone found, but none of your support team members ever confirmed that this solution was a good thing to use.

Can you take a look, and let me know if there is a way to write this as a filter to your code, as opposed to changing the actual plugin files?

https://toolset.com/forums/topic/toolset-view-load-css-in-div-displaynone-but-google-indexes-css-as-keywords/

I need to get this corrected ASAP.

Thanks!

May 19, 2018 at 10:47 am #901258

Beda

Well, if Google is not able to differentiate a style from a content, then we cannot change this, do you agree?
Every Website in this world will end up having some style or comments in the code.
If due to that Google would start indexing comments and styles, I assume we could call Google broken and report it to their support, I do not think that it is intended to index code comments by Google, but I may as well be wrong.

The Source code defines what is loaded, it holds HTML tags that tell any search engine if it's HTML, Content, Comment or what not. The Search engine should be intelligent enough to differentiate that.

Now, as for https://toolset.com/forums/topic/toolset-view-load-css-in-div-displaynone-but-google-indexes-css-as-keywords/#post-574709, here we have the exact issue as described above, and since Toolset uses the clearly WRONG markup here for style, Google simply indexes it.
The Client's solution there is not bad, although it hacks the plugin core files and I cannot suggest to do that.

But I suspect that this is all related to a BUG in Toolset:
https://toolset.com/errata/remove-unused-style-and-type-attribute-from-the-style-element/
This may confuse the machine and let her index things that you don't want to have indexed.

I suspect after that patch you will be good to go.