Is white text on a white background an issue when...?
-
Hi guys,
This question was loosely answered here (http://www.seomoz.org/q/will-google-index-a-site-with-white-text-will-it-give-it-bad-ratings), but I wanted to elaborate on the concern.
The issue I have is this,
http://www.searchenginexperts.com.au/preview/white-text-white-background-issue
Of the four div elements on the page, which;
-
is best practice for SEO? and
-
which of them would not be penalized by google on the grounds of hidden text?
The reason I ask is that I have a site that is currently implementing the first div styling, but if you either remove the image OR uncheck the repeat-x (in inspect element) the text is left as white on white.
I have added the transparent image on green to prove that having a background colour to back up the tiled image is not always going to work. What can be done in this scenario?
Thanks in advance,
Dan (From my managers account)
-
-
Yes Dan something like that could get reported. You should do your best not to have this happen, mostly on a large scale, a single incident would likely be ignored.
-
Thx Gents,
To clarify, the content in question was footer links on my clients site.
It sounds like the consensus is that the approaches I have in the example should be fine as my intention is not to deceive and only visitors (most likely competition) would flag this manually if it was.
What remains unanswered is that the last two examples on my test page will still create issues.
The third example inadvertently has a transparent section of the background image where text exists. You can see this if you click/drag over the middle section. I would imagine this would get flagged by visitors as hidden text (as it currently shows white text on white), but aside from offering a complimentary background colour to either the div element or the entire site (say a pastel colour) is there a better way to manage this than the fourth example (where I have simply offer a fallback green colour. This looks pretty bad)?
Thanks again...
Dan
-
Hey Dan
Ultimately, I don't think this would be a problem on an otherwise non spammy site. There is generally a big difference between a site that is using a set of spammy or manipulative techniques and one that makes a simple mistake like this so I doubt you have much to worry about if everything else is as it should be.
That said, I guess the simple question here is:
If you are using a background image and white text, why not use a background colour as well?
This would address the obvious usability issues relating to the image not displaying and clarify that there is no bad intention here to trick anything. Better for users, better for search engines, better for your SEO penalty related anxiety issues.
Hope that helps.
Marcus
-
Dan the rule of thumb is if the text is readable and not purposelessly hidden then you're safe. The operative word there is purposelessly.
I will also add that in general crawlers are not going to find these types of problems rather they are reported by users or more often than not your competition. From there search engines may have a human evaluate the report and make a manual ruling.
-
Ok the thing is, if text is humanly readable, you are safe. Just because you are using white texts and then something goes wrong with the style and the texts go invisible for a few days will not necessarily get your website banned. However, here I am assuming that you are not stuffing keywords there
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple h1 tags on this html 5 page a issue?
Hi Guys, I have a html5 page located here: https://tinyurl.com/yc6s3xs2 I know from some online discussions having multiple h1 tags on HTML 5 pages like this, shouldn't be an issue. Any thoughts on this? Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Post migration issues - #11 + configuration issue
Hello Moz community. I'm keen to find out your experiences on the following: Have you ever experienced a migration whereby a large % of keywords are stuck in position #11 - post migration? The keywords do not move up or down (whilst competitors jump from 13 to 9 and vice versa) over a three month period. Please see the % difference in the attached e-mail. (sample 1,000 keyword terms) Question: Has anyone ever experienced this type of phenomenon before? If so - what was the root cause of this and did this happen post migration? What solution did you use to rectify this? Have you ever seen a cross-indexing issue between two domains (each domain serves a different purpose) post migration, which impacts the performance of the main brand domain? I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: For example, the following is implemented on migration day: www.example.com/fr/widgets-purple => 301s to www.example.com/fr/widgets/purple But www.example-help.com now points to the same server where the customer service content is now hosted. So although the following is rendered: So although the following is rendered correctly: www.example-help.com/how-can-we-help We also have the following indexed in Google.fr - competing for the same keyword terms and the main brand website has dropped in rankings: www.example-help.com/fr/widgets-purple [legacy content from main brand website] Even when legacy content is 301 redirected from www.example-help.com to www.example.com, the authority isn't passed across and we now have www.example.com (as per Q1) a lot lower in Google than pre-migration. Question: Have you ever experienced a cross-indexing issue like above whereby Google potentially isn't passing authority across from legacy to the new setup? I'm very keen to hear your experiences on these two subjects and whether you have had similar problems on some of your domains. E0hbb
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMVSEO0 -
Have a Robots.txt Issue
I have a robots.txt file error that is causing me loads of headaches and is making my website fall off the SE grid. on MOZ and other sites its saying that I blocked all websites from finding it. Could it be as simple as I created a new website and forgot to re-create a robots.txt file for the new site or it was trying to find the old one? I just created a new one. Google's website still shows in the search console that there are severe health issues found in the property and that it is the robots.txt is blocking important pages. Does this take time to refresh? Is there something I'm missing that someone here in the MOZ community could help me with?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | primemediaconsultants0 -
Two Pics, one bit of Text single anchor link?
Hi thereGurus, sorry Aspirants ;-), I have a really nice looking menu used in my standard page template that has some SEO issues now due to possibly causing 'too many onsite links' penalty/downgrade on some of my bigger pages going >120 links. Wanting to keep the nice menu, I want to work around the issues if possible. The menu is comprised of 7 buttons with various keywords pertinent to the site. On the menu, hovering over the keyword in a button eg 'Technology' causes this button with word inside to do an animated slide down and a picture representative of 'Technology' to appear where the button was with the original button directly below it, which then a side menu slides out of to the right to reveal 5 anchor links that represent the 'Technology' menu category. The first option in this sub-menu is supposed to have the same anchor link as the description image and the button/button text that being it is like a category description. Trouble I am having is that the slide out menu requires a separate div for javascript reasons. I have one anchor covering the button and the pop-up image, but then I need a second anchor for the first line of the slide out menu (otherwise fails W3C). This is adding 7 duplicate anchors to the page on a e-Commerce page that already has too many anchors IMHO. I read in HTML5 you can have an anchor holding a div inside, but how about an un'd div? The next four items on the slide out menu go to other anchor links so it first anchor needs to end prior to these, hence halfway through a div. Is there another way of making multiple items (across div boundaries etc) only go to/count as one single anchor link? Thanks for your help, Brad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BM70 -
Mobile Sitemap Issue
Hi there, I am having some difficulty with an error on Webmaster Tools. I'm concerned with a possible duplicate content penalty following the launch of my mobile site. I have attempted to update my sitemap to inform Google that a different mobile page exists in addition to the desktop page. I have followed Google's guidelines as outlined here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DBC01
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648 I'm having problems with my sitemap.xml file. Webmaster tools is reporting that it is not able to read the file and when I validate it I am getting an error stating that the 'Namespace prefix xhtml on link is not defined'. All I am trying to do is to create a sitemap that uses the rel="alternate" to inform Google that their is a mobile version of that specific page in addition to the desktop version. An instance of the code I am using is below: xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="gss.xsl"?> <urlset< span="">xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"> http://www.mydomain/info/detail/ <xhtml:link< span="">rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)" href="http://m.mydomain.com/info/detail.html"/> <lastmod></lastmod>2013-02-01T16:03:48+00:00<changefreq></changefreq>daily0.50</xhtml:link<></urlset<> Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks0 -
Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?
We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Convert keyword rich PDFs to web pages (text & images)
SteriPEN is a portable water purifier that kills viruses, protozoa, e-coli, etc. Because of the technical and safety requirements nature of the product, our website has much documentation of testing, organisms affected, and more. These are in pdf form and can often be found through google search (and through links on specific pages). Because of the keyword-richness of these documents pertaining to microbes SteriPEN kills, etc. does it make sense to convert these pdf's into html text and images? Then I was thinking perhaps writing a blog post AND generating key links on important landing pages to these documents (as html). Removing pdfs may be harmful? Not a clue as to the cost/benefit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Where does "Pages Similar" link text come from?
When I type in a competitor name (in this case "buycostumes") Google shows several related websites in it's "Pages Similar to..." section at the bottom of the page: My question, can anyone tell me where the text comes from that Google uses as the link. Our competitors have nice branded links and our is just a keyword. I can find nothing on-page that Google is using so it must be coming from someplace off-page, but where?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0