Faint text = hidden text?

[pete88]

Hi

I have a site with lots of subtle and not so subtle text, which ranges from very clear black
text on white background, to very subtle, very light grey on white bg. Just as a design theme.

:confused:

Will I get banned for this? Will this count as hidden text?
Or is hidden text only if the text is EXACTLY the same colour as the background?

Many thanks for any tips :)

Pete

[pete88]

Is there anywhere I can read up about this thanks?

Is this metaphorically black and white?
ie text has to be exactly the same colour as the background, or is everything within e.g 5% of the background considered hidden text?

Also, I wanted to hide text as a way for people to discover easter eggs - should I re-think this hidden extra?

:)

Thanks for any tips

Pete

[David Wallace]

Search engines do not always automatically find hidden text. I can imagine that they have filters to detect when background and text are same color but how are they to know that the situation is not a nested table (i.e. white background - table with black background - white text in table).

Therefore I don't believe they really do much about hidden text unless a situation of it is reported via a spam report or they just happen to come across it.

That being said, what is the intent? I think that is what it really comes down to. Are you trying to somehow trick the engines by adding more text to a page then a user sees or is there a legitimate reason to have text that is barely visible such as in your case of Easter eggs?

[pete88]

Hi David

I take your point about text in tables, but wouldn't the search engines still know the background colour of the tables?
I presume you could have a table with an image as a bg, then google wouldnt know it was hidden text?

I like to hide things for people to discover (easter eggs) so hidden text was an easy thing to do. However I've just removed it since I read about google banning sites with hidden text.
I also have some subtle text as noted, but I'm not sure how subtle is considered hidden? is text colour #010101 too close to a bg colour of #000000?

The site is also image rich with some text rendered in a particular font. I was thinking about adding normal text and hiding it, so that at least the search engines could read it.

Thanks

Pete