I use a site builder for one of the sites that I am working on and in the header section I had the title of the site (e.g. Building Metal Widgets Guide) in plain text. On every page, at the top, it said Building Metal Widgets Guide. After having it this way for over a year, I changed the Building Metal Widgets Guide from plain text into a link to the home page.
Every page on the site now in the header section had Building Metal Widgets Guide as a link to the home page. I thought this would be a good change to make because Metal Widgets was a phrase that I was trying to rank for so I thought having links that contained those words in the anchor text would help me to rank.
What I didn’t realize, however, was that the text appeared white in color in link form and thus invisible when looked at in the text-only version of the cache page (I think this is how the search engines see it as well). When Building Metal Widgets Guide was written as plain text, it didn’t appear white in the text-only version of the cache page for some reason.
When Google saw the text in white in link form to the home page (and thus invisible in the text-only version of the cache page) on every page of the site with the keywords that I am trying to rank for as part of the anchor text, I think they saw this as me trying to trick the search engines and I received a penalty for it. I then changed from link text to plain text but some of the keywords that I was trying to rank for, in addition to Metal Widgets, went down in the rankings and it took a couple of months for it to go back to where it was ranking.
I was wondering, if I change the plain text to link text but this time change the color of the link text to something that doesn’t look invisible when against a white background, do you think this could help me to rank for Metal Widgets as well as related terms?
On many websites, at the top of all the pages, you do find a link to the home page.
