White Text

[corporateface]

A customer is telling me that "he heard" that when you use white text on a website the search engines consider it spam potential, and it can hurt your rankings.

The white text is on dark backgrounds, it is not on white backgrounds.

Is there any truth to this?

[Dubbya]

Don't worry about it if you're putting white text on a dark background. It won't trip any flags in the search engines.

There is truth to the "white text on white background" statement though. Bear in mind that having the foreground colour the same as the text colour, whether it's white or not, will likely get your site flagged for review.

The issue lies in the assumption that "hidden text" as it's called, indicates that the page was designed to game the search engines and gain an unfair advantage over better constructed and higher ranking sites.

First and foremost, as Web Developers, Designers and SEO experts, we're called upon to develop and optimize pages with the user in mind. In doing so, there should never be any reason to employ "hidden text" techniques to gain better rankings.

For the most part, it's got to be substantial and appear intentional. Let common sense prevail. If there's a reasonable explanation for it, it's unlikely that you'd see any issues arise.

Most often, these sites are manually reported by visitors. So, consider that if THEY see an obvious problem, the site reviewer probably will to.

If it's flagged for review and the reviewer decides it's an obvious attempt to game the search engines, it'll result in the site getting removed from the index until the issue is resolved and a re-inclusion request is submitted. It'll likely take some time but they'll revisit the site and reevaluate it for inclusion.

.02

[advancedmerchant]

It is not the color, it is the contrast. Brown on brown background is bad, White on black is fine, green on blue is ok by the search engines, but looks horrid.

When the color is too close to the background (in RGB space), the SE sees it as an attempt to "cloak" keywords and content.

[deepsand]

The particular color chosen for either text or backgound alone is irrelevant; rather, it is the contrast between the 2 that matters.

If both colors are identical, i.e. are defined by the same color code, such that a human viewer cannot distinguish the one from the other, SEs will not look kindly on that.

As to how dis-similar the color codes need to be in order to avoid the appearance of "cloaking" to any SE remains, to the best of my knowledge, undisclosed.

A good rule of thumb to follow is to simply design for easy readability for the user; don't try to emulate Wired magazine.

[Webconomist]

Usability studies have shown that white text over dark backgrounds is hard on the eyes. It's just a design thing of form that does not function...

that aside, you're question of text colour white for Google? no impact at all. We do a lot of work with PPC management and PPC fraud detection and thus Google, and no that is not an issue. (intevix - web information architects)


You would most likely get slammed for writing for the Spider instead of the Participants (we call "users" Participants, since "user" is so cold)...Google does not like content written for the computer. text colour is not an issue.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by Webconomist

Usability studies have shown that white text over dark backgrounds is hard on the eyes. It's just a design thing of form that does not function...

Can you point to any such studies?

The physical default for all CRT displays is a dark background in the absence of the phosphor being illuminated by the electron beam. That method has been employed since day one, and continues to be used today, for all type of terminals and instrumentation. It works exceeding well.

And, it works equally well, no matter the source signal; i.e., material sourced from the cloud is no different than that generated locally.

[qh4dotcom]

As long as the color of the text is not the same or very similar to the color of the background, you shouldn't worry

[jScott_Harris]

Webconomist - I've also always heard the opposite as well. It's just not practical to print books on black pages with white ink, or to fill an entire page with black ink. In fact, I usually do my text at #333333 or #666666 if its on a white background. The difference in contracts seems to alleviate some of the stress on the eyes.

[deepsand]

The controlling factors with regards to practicality are the default colors of the media and pigments that are mostly readily obtained.

Paper, owing to its physical composition, is naturally light in color. And, the bleaching required for deriving uniformity from a non-uniform stream of input material, drives the color of the end product toward the white end of the scale. At the same time, dark pigments for use as inks are more easily derived from natural elements than is white.

Were we to live in world which provided us with an easy and ready source of the opposite, we would most likely be accustomed to printed material comprised of white ink on dark paper.

Slate boards, naturally derived, are an obvious common usage of white images on a black background, one that works eminently well.

Electronic displays, be they CRTs, LEDs, LCDs, etal. have a default state of being "off," or black; the generation of light requires an input of energy. Light text or images on a dark background are therefore both natural and less consuming of power.

Even the eye functions with its default state being the absence of light; photoreceptors are triggered only by the presence of light. And, given that rods predominate over color sensing cones, which are operative only above a minimum threshold level of light, white on black is more easily detected than is any other combination.

[hrvoje461]

It doesn't metter at all regarding search engines if your text is on dark background. Anyway you can try for example #FAFAFA which is almost same as #FFFFFF.

[Webconomist]

The studies we did were produced in another life (that's a little convenient I know) and I don't have now...we spent $30,000 to determine the best corporate fonts for printed materials (Book Antiqua for body and Arial/Helvetica for headers, so there, I saved you $30,000 ) but for vision impaired, the more contrast the better.

I think, since I can't find the past studies I referenced I'm going to have to eat crow for now.

Time for some homework...I have a study here in my filing cabinet (yikes, paper!) done by some CS students at Dalhousie University indicating in many cases black text on white is better on eye strain for good visual, while the more strained the eyes become, it goes to white text in a dark background...the objective being eye strain management, and contrast.