Link background color

[andrew_m]

On one site I care for there is navigation on the left side (categories of widgets).

That navigation is in a table cell with a dark colored image as a cell background. The rest of the site's text is on white background. For text links to be visible against this dark image they are forced to be white (not style sheet, FONT COLOR).

Is google smart enough to figure out that these links are not "hidden" white on white? And does it even care for the color at all?

[automotivetouchup]

I am pretty sure google is smart enough to know. If you were going white text on a white page within a white table or cell this is the type of thing they call spam.

[automotivetouchup]

>And does it even care for the color at all?
Yes a white on white can get somone to be at the bottom or buried in the serp.

[andrew_m]

automotivetouchup, thanx.

The site in question does not try to do any shady things, white links on the dark image background were just part of their original design work. It looks nice, and I guess nobody just thought about SE's when it was designed.

Somehow I doubt google is that smart -- they will have to load the image, unpack it in memory and make a judgment about it's overall color. Nah, not gonna happen.

Which is confirmed by site's relatively low PR with tons of good links coming to it and thousands of pages of very good content.

So, my plan is to replace these text links with clickable images and put text into 'ALT'. Will see how it affects PR -- should be an interesting experiment.

[automotivetouchup]

On a few other threads I asked some similar questions.
To let you know, google does not read an image.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Now the alt description should be used for your images, GG can read that, And I think vision impaired can read it too, through the use of a different kind of software but I'm not too sure.
How long has the site been up? PR may be important, but not e