Can white text over images hurt your SEO?

[TomNYC]

Hi everyone,

I run a travel website that has about 30 pre-search city landing pages. In a  redesign last year we added large "hero" images to the top of the page, and put our h1 headlines on top of them in white. The result is attractive, but I'm wondering if Google could be reading this page as "white text on white page", which is an obvious no-no, especially if it could seem that we're trying to hide text.

Here's an example: http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/

H1: Expert reviews of cheap hotels in Paris

I should add that our SERPs for these city pages has dropped (for "Cheap hotels in X"), but it could obviously be related to other issues.

Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks!

Tom

[Everett]

Hello Tom,

Five or six years ago this may have been a problem, but I seriously doubt it is right now. The text is clearly visible to humans and bots and you are not doing anything malicious. The div with the text appears over the image and it views fine in text and full mode when looking at Google's cache of the page.

Though both Pedram and Donford have answered your initial question well, I could not officially "endorse" them because I don't advocate keyword density ranges and do not agree that a manual review of the site would result in you being subject to any kind of penalty.

Write naturally for the topic at hand, focusing content on the correct keywords and topics with the goal of being helpful to the reader. Don't worry about manual checks for this because it will be obvious to the person looking at the site that nothing fishy is going on.

Good luck!

[donford]

Hi Thomas,

The last I heard Google / Bing / MSN /Yahoo has no automatic way to know if you were obfuscating text. The way sites are built now, layers on layers or divs inside divs it would pretty difficult to decipher all the code to just check if there is hidden text. However, if a competitor catches you doing it, reports it, and then the Search Engines do a manual check you're likely going to get dinged.

I haven't seen anything new on this subject in a year or more but looking at your site I don't think this is your problem. In fact our corporate site uses white text on an image on every single page and we have no issues.

[CSawatzky]

I doubt it. The titles aren't hidden at all. It looks good as you said, but it's not purposefully hidden at all.

As you said, there are many reasons as to why you're seeing dropped listings. You're targeting competitive keywords. Perhaps you should try to run a link audit on different websites on page 1 for your targeted terms and see what's going on with your competitors. Maybe they have a better (or worse) linking strategy or social share strategy than you?

Have you done a keyword density check on your site? Try to keep keyword density to around 1-3% (that's what's worked for us in the past).

Of course there are also the fundamentals: make sure you have keywords in all the right places (which it seems that you do - maybe consider putting keywords in the URL).

Hope this helps.