(In)visible Text / White Backgrounds

[janejanejane]

Question Regarding Background Colors

I have site with a white background - though many of the primary headings are situated in tables with non-white backgrouns. Here, the primary headings are in white (and are visible due to the contrast with the table).

Here is the question: I heard that Google (and others) may interpret the white headings as "invisible text" - or spam - even though they are visible (however, because the background is white - you can be penalized).

Can anyone verify or dispel this? - Thanks! JaneJane

[jimbeetle]

Hi Jane,

Welcome to Webmaster World.

Nope, as long as people can read it you're okay. Reversed-out text is ages old and if the practice were suddenly banned I'd say more than half the sites on the web would be out of Google's index.

Jim

[nativenewyorker]

If you are using stylesheets and want to be sure, just ban all robots from accessing your *.css file with robots.txt. That way the robots will treat everything as black text with white backgrounds.

IMO, if you are doing all font colors and backgrounds locally, you are taking more of a chance, but like jimbeetle says you would be in the same boat with lots of other folks. Goolge by the way does use white text in blue backgrounds on their search results page at the top.

Ted

[BigDave]

I've heard of lots of people worrying about it, but I've never heard of anyone getting penalized in the case that you describe.

[toddb]

i know of some sites the use same color on same color for spam purposes and they are indexed every month with no problem. I am not sure if it takes a complaint but I don't think the bots can spot it. So being legit I would not worry at all.

[cwebb]

The only problem would be if you hard-code the body background and the text AND use CSS for the table background, then G would only see white text and white background but not the color of the table!

But G has lots of pages with hidden text in it's index and highly ranked, still, I wouldn't advise it as anyone in here!