Thread: Page content the same font color as background

Originally Posted by Business_with_Greg

I recently had a webmaster suggest that I change my home page listing of cities and states i was trying to have crawled to the same font as the background.

Did you mean use the same text and background color so web surfers can't see it? If so, that is a form of hidden text and is frowned upon by the major search engines.

If the page in question is the one in your signature, listing all of those cities at the bottom of the page will not do much for your SEO efforts, regardless of the font color you choose. Simply put, that's "Old School" keyword stuffing.

What you need to do is organize your web site hiearchy in a format that works best for the web surfers visiting your web site. Once you nail the hierarchy, then work on your link structure and content for those pages.

If you make the navigation simple for both search engines and web surfers, and develop relevant content for each of your pages, then you are on your way to properly optimizing your site for users and search engines.

I did it because when I stuck in a city and searched for (city name) Mortgage Broker I jumped to #1 in some of the cities on another page I had that was deleted because the company filed Bankruptcy. It has to hold some weight because I was not ranking at all without adding those city names.

For example "dresden mortgage broker" in MSN. My old site is still indexed. www.gregphillips.home123.com

If your competition finds out they can get you banned. Not worth it. There are plenty of other ways to get that content in there. You can easily hire an SEO content writer to get the job done. And if you still want to hide text there are legit ways of doing that. Email me if you want to know specifics info at leadsearchsolutions dot com.

Indeed its a very bad idea. In the 'old days' people would add some footer or even header text to websites with exact the same font colour as the background, hence it was not readable. This text would contain keywords and phrases hence potentially increasing a pages keyword density a technique designed to increase search engine rank position (SERPs). Google though (specifically, although Yahoo and MSN are able) is able to identify such attempts to hide text and information in a sites pages, hence the result is your site will likely get banned or sandboxed.

I think that google cat see these cheat, whent it is made with outer css file, because the craw bot only reads in the html source...

But someone may report for your cheat and you will be banned.

If you read Matt Cutts blog (an engineer for Google), you will find that hiding the text like that is a big no-no with most major search engines.

SEO should not be about "tricking" the search engines. It has been stated many times that you should design your website to be SEO friendly in a way that is geared towards the end user. Would you still put the same color font on the same color background if it didn't improve your SERPS? The answer is clearly no.

Remember that Google has the right to remove anyone from their search results if the deem it to be necessary. If they let people get away with whatever they wanted then Google would lose it's value. Everyone has heard the story of a child surfing the net and the a porn site pops onto their screen. The child wasn't looking for the porn, a morally ungrounded webmaster tricked the child to going to their site via a re-direct or other method. If you couldn't find what you where looking for on Google anymore because they let webmasters do whatever they felt like then people would stop using Google and they don't want that.

go for it google's a machine

that Webmaster is nuts. you can be banned from SE. try to stay in white/gray area.

Fire that webmaster immediately if you've hired him!

Don't hide your content or try and trick Google with hidden text. It's not smart and yes you will get banned.

If you're trying to hide something that's ugly either make it look better or move it lower on the page so it's not immediately visible.

If you are keyword stuffing your pages you'll also get banned. Don't slap a 500 word paragraph (filled with cities and other keywords) at the bottom of your site pages just to get more traffic. Google can see right through this and they are getting smarter by the minute.