Hi, I am not an SEO expert, but I do know that if you put content on the home page with the text as the same color as the background, Google will consider it to be a bad thing. I advised a friend of this when he had his home page professionally designed a while back. I just noticed that he re-did his website and now has a picture with a background color and the same color content overlaid over the picture's background color instead of on the background, itself. Can someone tell me if he is going to have the same problem with Google? By the way, this is a very 'artsy' site and he is not using bad or incorrect content on his home page, he is just trying to make it all graphical in nature for the human visitors while still showing some relevance for the search engines. Thanks!
Tell him he is wasting his time doing it in this fashion. You do not need to go this far to let the search engines which keywords you trying to target. A good alt tag on the picture will work well instead of overlaying text on it. I would remove anything that may look like it could get you trouble.
is the text 'hidden'? google won't be able to determine the color of the image, so you may be okay... but I'd probably take banless' advice and just use good alt keywords. moral of the story - if it sounds shady, it probably is - and there's a good chance that google will pick up on it.
I didn't quite understand your post. It sounded like your hiding your text in a "blackhat" way and so Google will eventually bust your friend. I suggest just doing things normally...
Thanks to everyone for their input. I did a little more research and found that it was indeed a 'blackhat' type of thing and have advised my friend to have his web designer remove it immediately. Thanks again.