Hi, I was wondering if someone could help answer a question. On my website (http://www.taxfix.co.uk) I have recently changed the links on the side from being images to text for SEO purposes. The links are in white because of the background images. I was wondering would Google see the white links and as a result penalise me even though it goes with the background. Thanks
Interesting question. I think Google is intelligent enough to know that you're abiding by good practices. I don't believe you will be penalized for that... I could be wrong though - anyone have a solid answer?
I have some websites which also have such a combo, and never had any problems. I'm sure google can read the css properly and figure out if you're a bad guy or not. Or maybe it flags your site for some time, and an operator will review it, and see manually that you are a good guy
Google does NOT care what color or background-images you use - in fact on the whole anything declared for presentation is ignored. I'd be more concerned that with all that endless redundant inline presentation search engines won't be able to find your content... can't see the forest for the trees as it were. <TABLE WIDTH=114 BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=0 CELLSPACING=0> <TR> <TD width="114" height="17"><font color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><strong><a href="tax-refund.html"><font color="white" face="Arial">Tax Refund Info</font></a></strong></font></TD> </TR> <TR> <TD><strong><font color="#FFFFFF" size="2" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><IMG SRC="images/spacer.gif" WIDTH=63 HEIGHT=10 ALT=""></font></strong></TD> </TR> Single column table, redundant property declarations, spacer .gif's, image maps, ... Welcome to 1997 and /FAIL/ at SEO and Accessability. <ul id="menu"> <li><a href="tax-refund.html">Tax Refund Info</a></li> That's all the code that should be there really. I'd suggest throwing out the HTML and starting over clean if you are really worried about search engines and/or alternative browsing methods. If nothing else it would save you money in bandwidth since I'm willing to bet I could recode that page to half it's current size or more. Oh, and it's broken on 'large font/120dpi' machines too - probably the use of dynamic fonts on your side menu.
one more suggestion if u are at making changes.. tables are long gone, its better to use DIVs for layout. Ekta.
Great thansk for the advice. Just one other question, my layouts etc which are out of date....does it matter from an SEO point of view that they are out of date, or is it just bad practice? Thanks
I read somewhere that if you text/links are white then Google will think that you are spamming because you are trying to fill the page with invisible keywords. I don't know how true this is and thats why I thought I would check. The site is doing well in the search engines, I just want to improve. Thnks for the advice
it does matter, because tables have a bad habbit to add extra non-semantic code in your page. so a page that should be lets say 20Kb, it takes like 50-60Kb. Now you do the mapping: is it easier to find information in 20Kb semantic code, or in 50Kb non-semantic code? As for google and the white links, there are plenty of sites that use white links on dark backgrounds. this shouldn't be a problem. white has no special properties from a search engine point of view. it could be dangerous (and the css validator will tell you so) if the background is the same color as the links (keeping in mind that background color is white by default). but if you add bg images, it should be just fine, and the css validator will only issue a warning that "you could have links the color of the background".