White Text on White Background - but Over a Dark Graphic

[WhiteHart]

Since a relaunch of our website we noticed a vast drop in visits almost overnight. My concern is that we used white text (CSS) on a white background with a dark graphic (background CSS). This has now been fixed and the visits have increased slightly although no where near back to where they were.

Would Google have penalised us for this? and now that we have fixed this should we now use the re-inclusion in web master tools?

I am just checking to see if anyone knows how to tell if a site has been excluded and whether Google penalises you for re-submitting the site if the problem has not been fixed (assuming that it was the white on white).

[jinxed]

I have done this many times without any problems. I'd imagine this is very common.

The only time I would have thought this would cause issues is where you did not have a background image and just white on white.

[HuskyPup]

Since a relaunch of our website we noticed a vast drop in visits almost overnight.

Have you changed titlebars, meta descriptions and on-page details etc or even navigation and url structure?

[StoutFiles]

Pretty sure you lost traffic due to the relaunch of your website in general. Mnay people have made their sites cleaner and faster but Google seems to penalize for huge changes due to what I've read here.

[tedster]

Not every ranking drop is a penalty. I see it like this. Google does not rank your content on its own, or your "site" on its own. Google ranks your URLs - according to relevance and popularity of the content they hold.

If a complete redesign changes the URLs, then the new URLs have an uphill climb. If significant content is changed, again, it can be an uphill climb - even if the URLs have remained the same. The previous rankings were earned by the old content. Google needs to trust check that the previous rankings still make sense for their users. given that the content is now different.

There are ways to leverage your old site's achievements to make that uphill climb easier - and we discuss those all the time on this forum. But it's still an uphill climb.