6 replies to this topic

[timbers]

If a page has a background colour of e.g. white and somewhere within the page has white text in table cells with a dark background (which are perfectly visible) will this be deemed cloaking and cause rankings to be penalized by search engines?

An SEO agency mentioned to me that it would, but I'd appreciate some supporting (or otherwise) feedback before I start adjusting the sites that this may be affecting.

[qwerty]

By my definition of the term, it's not cloaking. It's spamming. And yes, IMO it would cause problems. I don't think surrounding white on white text in visible table cells would change the fact that it's white on white text.

[timbers]

Thanks for the swift reply Bob!

To clarify, the text is also visible, i.e. the table cell with dark background colour has white text within it.

[qwerty]

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood the question. Too early in the morning, I guess. I thought the table cells had visible borders, but white background.

Please ignore everything I said

[Alan Perkins]

It's not cloaking.

AltaVista did once penalise a lot of sites for using white text on a white background, when in fact the text was in table cells with a non-white background. When they realised their error they acted to undo it.

That incident didn't happen recently, but it remains a risk that some SE programmer will get a little over-zealous with the spam filter. I wouldn't be over-worried about, though.

[Jill]

It's not a problem. On millions of sites. Got nothing to do with cloaking, and it's not search engine spam either.

Jill

[timbers]

thanks for that one and all - most reassuring! [great site Jill by the way ]