Black Hat SEO – Black Text on a Black Background

Posted • October 23, 2009 • 1 Comment

The Black Text on a Black Background Black Hat SEO Technique Like it says in the Johnny Winter Song is “Still Alive and Well”

With Halloween coming up I figured it would be a good time to dust off my black hat and do a little sleuthing online. One of the oldest black hat SEO tricks in the book is the same color text as the background.

Back on the old days of the early ’90s we used to put the word “free” as many times as possible on a page in white text on a white background. Well the search engines caught on to this and put an end to it. “The same color text as the background was no longer a viable solution.” When they allowed text for some of the colors it ignited a resurgence of using the same color text as the background and it escaped the search engines view at least for a while. (Font color “white” background color “#ffffff” was working.)
(Post from Search Engine Optimizician.)
As the power of CSS increased so did its use for black hat SEO. There are many techniques using CSS employed today and not all of them are black hat. Just like anything else if something has a function it will be used for both evil as well as good.

Let’s take a look at the site in question.

Beautiful site so where is the text?

There it is hidden behind the header.

Using the search term “paul shipper” this site comes up first in Google so tie black hat SEO used on this site must be working.

The same search term comes up #3 in Yahoo and not in the top 30 on Bing. Does this mean that Bing is better at detecting black hat SEO techniques? That’s a topic for another post.

Here is the text hidden by the class=”paragraph_style” used on a black background.

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How they get caught by Google if they are not seeing it?
They can be reported to Google’s “Report a Spam Result“.

Now back to Johnny Winter. Just like all the olde black hat SEO techniques and the lyrics to Johnny’s hit song say are “still alive and well“. I am not advocating the use of any black hat SEO in any way shape or form just reporting on their use.

Late,
Gary Pool

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