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By now, everyone
knows that unscrupulous web masters and designers use spamming
techniques in an attempt to achieve higher rankings on search
engines. You, on the other hand, have decided to follow the safe
route, avoiding any schemes that could get you penalized or even
banned from major search engines. You have carefully designed
your pages. No tricks to fool the spiders; only straight-forward
design techniques. Well, that may not be what the spiders think...
The issue: text and background
of the same color. Wait, before rushing to leave the page, believing
you have heard everything on the topic, you might want to pause
and reconsider what you know.
Search engine
spiders see web pages differently then you do. They carefully
analyze the HTML and META Tags of your pages to index your site.
Sometimes, HTML tags can be misinterpreted; this is particularly
true for Background color, Font color, and Link color tags. Background
color tags (<BG COLOR>) are used to define the color of
the background of a page as well as the background of table cells.
Hence, a page that uses colored tables (see example below) will
have several background colors. Use the same colors for your
text and links anywhere on the page, and you will be perceived
as a spammer.
The problem: visible text can be
considered as hidden text by some spiders. For example, the page
your are currently reading has a white background, blue/black
text, and blue links. Yet, it also features a table with blue-colored
cells and white text (see below).
To the human
eye, no text has been hidden because it always appears on a different
background color. So it is perfectly visible (i.e. blue and black
text is set on white background; in the table, the white text
is set on blue background). But the spiders see your design differently;
they see blue- and white-colored backgrounds combined with blue,
white, and black text/link colors. Conclusion: we are hiding
text in your page (i.e. white text over white background and
blue text over blue background).
Example
of table that could cause a potential problem:
| Table cell with blue background and white text
= spamming because the rest of the page also has white background
and blue text |
The solution
is simple. Look at your page as whole. No background, font, or
link can be of the same color. No exceptions or you will join
the thousands of unintentional spammers who get penalized for
submitting web pages thought to contain spamming techniques.
(Note: for
the purpose of this example, we have used colors in the cell
that are not exactly the same as the colors on the rest of the
page although they appear the same to the human eye. After all,
we could not set the wrong example to follow).
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