The purpose of this experiment is to attempt to establish with more certainty the types of error that can lead to the image rendering in modern browsers, but not appearing in Google's indexed cache of the page. We'd also like to see whether, if an image does appear in the indexed cache, it can then necessarily be found in a Google image search.
The reason for carrying out this experiment is that this is a phenomenon that has been seen in the real world. We would like to have our images available for searching, and we suspect that either the dodgy divs or the CSS hack is causing problems.
The pages in the experiment are as follows:
- Control page: this page simply places a picture, with description, within a div.
- Variation 1: this page puts a picture with description within a nested div.
- Variation 2: this page puts a picture with description within nested divs where the outer div is given an id that is the same as the class name given to the inner div.
- Variation 3: this page puts a picture with description within a nested div, and uses a CSS hack to restrict the height of the div.
- Variation 4: this page combines the conditions of variations 2 and 3
- Results: see here for the results of the experiment.
