I would agree with the color argument to a point, however... There are times that reverse colors are appropriate, as is the case with the site I'm currently working on. In this case the site owner's lawnmower racing team runs black machines with white lettering, his pickup is black, his trailer is black with white lettering, his racing apparel is black with white lettering, and thus his site is black with white lettering to stay in tune with everything else he has going on.
We haven't seen any problems with the site on the search engines, Google included, aside from the fact that we're buried in the sandbox with it on Google at present, and we're way short on links yet. It has placed quite well on the other engines. The demo page I ran on my site, which was found and ranked extremely well, therefore I've left it up and linked it to the new site until we get out of the sandbox, is running the same template, and likewise hasn't seen any issues as a result of reverse page colors. Not sure what it may show in local results for all of you, but on my end, search for
mower racing parts finds it at #6, search for
G-Team finds it at #2,
G-Team Racing finds it at #1 and
likewise the new site at #13.
Granted there's not much competition in these queries, but the demo page is one page sitting alone on an
SEO and Design site, with no external linking whatsoever, and these listings would obviously indicate that Google does not discriminate against white text on black pages.
I would agree with jaldridge on the potential issues with white text over black image, to a point as well, but I don't think Google would consider color in an image in any respect in consideration of hidden text. As stated, Google has no idea what color an image is; how could it determine if text were supposedly hidden over it to penalize a site?? Common sense would dictate that an image in background is seen strictly as an image and thus I assume appropriate, unless Google can read images.
As for brian.mark's comments on-page text not carrying any weight... I can show you close to 40 queries on one page on my site that would argue that point! The only links to that page are two internal links on my site. Since I'm sitting at
#3 & 4 for Kansas Crappie Fishing with it up here in ND, with all the links in the article pointed at the site I was targeting in Kansas, to try and boost his SERP, it's kinda difficult to say content doesn't matter.
And,
per this query, the only place the terminology searched for is found, with exception to the word Kansas, is in page content, the remainder is not in meta at all, it's not linked at all. Realistically, it has very little to with page topic! The first word in that query is found first line of content, the remainder of the query is found 7 lines from the bottom of the page, so obviously Google is reading page content, all of it, and it does carry a good deal more weight than you assert.
You want longer odds...
try this query. In fact I can take the first half of that query and toss it with any of a dozen or more phrases used on the page that aren't found in meta or linked in any way, that are essentially irrelevant to topic and it's found,
this one for instance. In my book, these finds clearly indicate, that page content does have a place on Google, it is read and association with terminology on a page made.