Does this count as white text on a white background?

I've heard google penalizes for that.

Ok, say I have white text (CSS) and my background is white, but at one point I have some white text that is over top of a dark blue background image. So the background is white and the text is white, but the white text is over a dark IMAGE so it's visible to the end user.

Will i be penalized for that?

 

Im not pretty sure, but i guees you will be penalized for that.

 

Its called BLACK HAT SEO

 

You can not keep the color of content same as of background..

 

Though the text is visible to the Users, but for Search Engine Crawlers color of the background and text is same and that may consider this as unethical practice of seo or Black Hat SEO.

So it is better to make both color different so the text can also be visible and also both color does not match.

 

If your intending on trying to hide some text, even if its not on all pages but you know what you're doing it for then its questionable why you may want to do that.

So then you ask yourself if its worth the risk.

 

You will definately get penalized. If not now, it will surely come. I will advice that you drop the idea, it is not worth it.

 

I'm not TRYING to hide text.

I just realized that I have white text over a red image, so it's visible, but the background is white.

But it's just links, it's not even like keywords or anything. I guess I'll change the background color of that table cell and hope the image still appears above that and the text above that.

 

cool, yeah that worked.

so now it's like this, from top to bottom:

White text
Red background image
Black bgcolor

 

oh and if you think you can get around google, then remember google has a spam report webpage where you can report black hat websites, so if google does not find you naturally then your competitor can report you and there is a high chance Mr G will de index you...

oh and if you get de-indexed, do remember google keeps track of ip addresses

 

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

Using white text on a white background; Including text behind an image; Using CSS to hide text
Setting the font size to 0; Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because: The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical). CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site.

Hope you don't like to be out of index! )

 

White text on white BG is considerd as black hat.. so there is a chance of de value the site.. But no chance of penalization

 

I see.

I wasn't intentionally hiding anything tho and if viewed by a human my page would look great. I just realized after the fact that to a computer it may look like I'm hiding something.

 

Yeah I think he gets it by now. Good call making the switch, better safe than sorry if you're ever unsure.

 

Hidden text will not always result in a penalty even if you are reported to Google. It depends on your use of the hidden text. Hidden text will almost always result in a penalty if you're using it to manipulate your rankings. Hidden text will likely NOT result in a penalty if it is done to improve the user's experience.

Google can detect a lot of hidden text programatically. When indexing your pages, they are looking for things like the same background and foreground colors for the text. You can make it difficult for them to detect it in an automated fashion by externalizing all of your styling. By this I mean don't include ANY colors, font size, alignment, etc... formating in your HTML source. <strong> is really the only styling I allow my developers to include in the HTML source. All other styling is done via CSS and all CSS is stored in external CSS files. This is always a good coding practice for the web. You get the added benefit increased content:code ratio. You page has more content and less HTML code.

Once you've externalized your formating/styling, the only thing your really have to worry about is being reported by a competitor or someone who just stumbled upon your hidden text.

There are a couple of questions I always ask myself before using hidden text:

1) Does it improve the user experience of my site?
2) Would it withstand a manual review by a Googler should someone report my use of hidden text? In other words, would it be obvious to someone looking at my use of hidden text that it is being used to improve the user experience on the site, not SOLELY to improve my rankings?

For example, if you are using hidden text to implement help tips on your page, this is totally acceptable. You may have hover help text that appears on some section of the page anytime someone hovers their mouse over certain words on the page. This will likely withstand a manual review by a Googler and NOT result in a penalty. It's obvious you are using it to improve the user experience by providing help tips. It doesn't matter that some of the text in the help tips might also help you rank for some keyword phrase. As long as it is obvious that the intent was to improve the user experience, the side effect of improved SEO is acceptable.

However, if you have hidden text in your HTML source that NEVER gets displayed to the user, this will almost certainly result in a penalty should you be reported. Having hidden text on your page that is totally unrelated to the page's topic (for example, using Britney Spears in your hidden text) will also get you penalized.

Any time you're faced with decisions like this in the 'gray areas' of SEO where you wonder whether you'll get penalized, just error on the side of doing what is right for the user. If you do that, you'll almost always be safe in Google's eyes.

 

This is Google we are talking about.

If it is visible to the end user, Google will know it is visible or know that it is done for the user.

Either way, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

Yes, it will be black hat technique because crawler can not read the images and your text matches with the background color.

 

This is considered as a block hat technique. Don't even try it!

 

The real question is "What's the real SEO reason for doing something like this?"

White on white is considered by all SEs as "hidden text" and will get the page "gray barred". All's the SEs have to do is turn off CSS to detect it. Or run the indexing in "text only" mode.

The SEO reason is to increase the "keyword density" on a page. And when the competition detects it, they will report it to Google who will then assign a human to review the site. At this time, everything is detected and the site judged.

If you feel this technique is worth a 6 month "gray barred" site, have at it. This concept is so out dated that it goes back to 1999 SEO.

It's not "black hat", is just stupid. There is not SEO advantage of any kind to use this technique.

 

Without intending to go into black-hat tactics I'm curious what would happen if you had a black background, the a white image above that with white text above that? We say that google can't tell what colour an image is so would it see white text on a black background and be happy with the content or would there be some special magic going on to determin the colour or shade of the image?