Backgrounds. Might it be spam?

Hello everybody,

As we all know, writing a text in color of a background is considered by some (most of?) search engines as SPAM.

But what happens if I have a background image, very dark, almost black, so in order to make text visible I do it almost white? :

First question is if Googlebot is able to recognize such situation if both text and background are presented as bgcolor="#F1F1F1", text="#000000" and so an.

Second question is if Googlebot is smart enough to recognize that a text is white, because there is a black image as background. Or maybe, if Googlebot sees that there is any kind background image, this option is automatically turned off?

ROBERT “RICK” NOGACKI

you want that the user can read the text or not?
if it is usefull for the user > google will like it.
mauri

Thanks for an answer.
Yes, I mean readable text. But the problem is that I’d like to use some fractals as background. They are dark, so text is going to be yellow. If googlebot is not able to recognize my reasons for making text pale yellow, I’m afraid that THEN it will consider this as spam and punish me for text, which – in fact – is well visible on dark background

If background is dark (black) text is yellow > I don’t see a prob.
Your example F1F1F1F1 background text 0000000 is grey and black.
So no prob.
Picture is dark text yellow> so it’s fine.
“Yes, I mean readable text” so I don’t need a magnifying glass ?;)

But I believe I miss understand you.
Regards
mauri

I really don't know anything about this, but...

why not just set the background colour to black? The background colour will be obscured by the image anyway, so it doesn't matter to the user, but Google should be able to notice that the background and text are different colours.

Also, if the image is large then it may take considerable time for some users on slow connections to download. This way the text is visible even if the image isn't there yet.

Why not make a GIF image 1 pixel wide the color you want the background and then spam over it with the same color text? That way you won't get caught. LOL

J/K

if you define your background color in a css-file, you never will have a problem. Crawlers can´t see the definitions in a css-file-

If my background is white and I have an image running the whole length of the page with white text links on top of the image, is this considered spam :

What do YOU think?

I've seen a recent thread, where people were debating whether SE's actually bother anymore with text color/background color matches.

Youn could just make the background colour black, either through the body tag or as suggested CSS.

Then again I just came accross this in a thread

What if your text is small? Like 1 or 2 pt. Will google punish you for this? Text still comes up in search for key words but is to small to read.