Is GoogleBot Crawling CSS Files?

The GoogleBot collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. The recent debate at the SEO Refugee Forums has highlighted the topic,Goglebot is crawling CSS Files or not.

A member claims “I tested this a few months ago: Do search engines crawl CSS files? The test was simple enough: change the name of the CSS file and look for requests from Googlebot and from google.com. This test works around any caching of the CSS file, and also picks up any cloaked requests. End result? No crawling over a two-week period with thousands of Gbot requests for pages (it nicely coincided with a time when Gbot took a deep dive). I keep checking once in a while for the CSS file requests and nothing has come up.”

Another user wanted more CSS files. One is from ekstreme.com. However, he could not find any Googlebot request for that. He checked other sites and failed to find any requests there either. He concludes there is only a CSS file request by Googlebot.

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