I have a customer that spoke with an 'SEO guy' that told him all his text must be black or search engines won't recognize it. I can't beleive that would be true, otherwise all websites would have the same look and couldn't have a dark background. Has anyone ever heard of this theory and confirm?
That is totally not true.It would be absurd to see an all gray bold lay-out.Perhaps he meant the title only?
SEs probably don't render the contents as the browsers do. So there should be no effect of what color is used for text.
I lol'd so hard....pink....hahaha That SEO Guy must be new. Is this person's website background white?
Not true. The big thing is not to try to trick the search engines by making your text the same color as your background...
What the SEO guy probably meant in this particular case, is that in thsi particular case the website background is white so for readability sake the on page text needs to be black in color. As long as it is readable to a human visitor, the search engine will act like a human visitor would do - if you are using black on black for example, then it means you are trying to use hidden text keyword stuffing to confuse mislead and misguide the search engine into making a wrong content-worthiness factor for your website.
I think color of the text has nothing to do with search engines. Not unless if they changed their algorithm that color coded text has less impact on search engine. LOL
Hi - I'm source of Rad_Dev question. I'm working with the client that hires this "SEO Guy". I haven't talked to the SEO Guy, but the stuff he tells my client seems bizarre. My client tells me that Mr. SEO goes to Google conventions and is a such a wiz-bang genius he's even contracted by Google to help them develop their site. He says the black text thing is a brand new criteria. ALSO - we switched the position of two menus and he said that changing the site in that manner will negatively effect SEO. We only moved one on top of the other. Sounds like B.S., smells like B.S., but I don't want to call it B.S. - 'cause I really don't know. I'm a self taught, one man operation and I run into this kind of thing every so often. I use what common sense I have. This guy makes claims of greatness that make him into an instant expert. I get clients that are paying big time monthly bucks for things that sound imaginary. I wish there was some definite authority that I could point them to and say "Look - you're getting fleeced" - but it's just my word against the big talkers. How do you debunk these guys and save the client from spending themselves out of biz??? Is there a Snopes.com for web developer B.S.ers?
Good joke The only thing about text color: it shouldn't be too close to background color, it could be considered as search spam. All other color schemes are ok.
Never heard the "new" theory and it's just some more BS, but then perhaps the client didn't get the real message, and we get the filtered message. If the seo guy could repeat this here on DP we could laugh at him, but I guess he's not really saying that like it has been reported. At least I hope.
Unfortunately, it's unfiltered. I'm helping the site owner with the design and had to make all the text on the site black because owner's Mr. SEO said so.
Mr. SEO said it to you, or he said it to the site owner who then repeated it to you? On the one hand it's simply too stupid to be able to believe it, but on the other hand there are lots of other things on many topics which sound stupid and are believed and told by many.
stupid advice.. the seo guy think seo has eyes so can compare colors.. or, maybe the seo guy advice is use black while the background is black? stupid too ? LOL..