white font on a dark background

does googlebot read it or not?

[modoc]

Hello,
I have a top part of my page in dark colours and I use white font on it. It seems that googlebot doesn't index it and takes it as invisible text, eventhough I use .css and it's on dark background. Does anyone know if it's true or if I just have to be more patient? Thanks!

[SmallTime]

Hi, welcome to WebmasterWorld.
It should not be a problem, although I can picture a few scenarios where the text color as different to background might be a little ambiguous. Are both background and text color set in css, or both on page, or one in css, one in background image, etc?

[mbauser2]

Text colors shouldn't affect whether or not Googlebot indexes text. Googlebot doesn't really have eyes, so it doesn't "see" color. It parses code, and the code contains text regardless of the associated color codes.

I'm curious as to how you "know" that Google isn't indexing the text. You might just be confused by the way Google pulls snippets from a page. Unlike some engines, Google doesn't default to using the lead text of a page as the description: it pulls any two lines it thinks are relevant to the search terms.

[ciml]

It is in Google's interest to catch pages that try to hide content (whether by font colour, CSS visibility, pictures behind images, etc.) but the general view is that they're not good at this yet.

I have some pages with a background set to dark by external CSS and font colour set to white by inline CSS. Google seems to find that text OK, but I do wonder sometimes if I should change it.

[modoc]

background colour is not in css, just regular bgcolor tag, for the font I'm using css.

As to how I know about googlebot not indexing, well, I'm not 100% percent sure about it, however for my main keyword I rank first and google pulls this description: "Back to my company's Home page. Home page. Advanced search. General Condiditions.About us. Help. Links."
My main text that includes my keywords is above these links and these links aren't in white colour, which is why I came to a possible conclusion of googlebot not indexing the text.
Thanks for your help! :-)

[andy04031]

modoc

<<My main text that includes my keywords is above these links

there are different views - is your text really above? Do you see it in the browser above and/or do you see it in the html code above? Those are two pair of shoes. Whatever you see in the browser window on the top doesn't mean necessarily the text is really on the top.
Even if Google is looking for keyword related text during the entire page it's always better to have good text on the top.

Send me the URL as a sticky mail, I'll take a look at it.

[modoc]

The important text is in the same <TR> as the indexed text that appears as my description on google, actually it's in the very first <TD> even before this text.
It's deffinitely the first text to be spidered.
:-)