I’m not sure this is going to have a factual answer, so I’m posting it here.
I’m helping a buddy of mine out with putting together his fledgling company’s website. I’m not a web designer by any means; my HTML skills are passable, but I’ve had to spend a fair amount of time on the web in order to figure out how to accomplish different things.
One thing I’ve run across many, many times is that a professional website should have a white background. The site I’m working on has a black background, as my buddy and I feel it looks better. This isn’t what I’m looking for insight on, though.
At some point a couple of days ago I came across the claim that Google “has a preference” for sites with white backgrounds, i.e. its search engine “gives priority” to such sites. There was a link leading to further information, which I did not follow, as I didn’t give much though to it at that moment. Now I have given it some thought, but I can’t for the life of me remember where I saw it. I’ve spent an hour or so searching for anything on this claim, but have come up with nothing.
Does anyone know if there is any truth to this? I find it hard to believe. Sure, I can see how it would be possible, but I don’t see why Google would do this. What do they care what color a website is?
I worked for a fairly SEO-focused web development agency for the last three years and was a fair bit geeky before that, and I’ve never heard anything like that.
Are you sure it wasn’t something related to keyword stuffing - trying to fool Google by using irrelevant white text on a white background to get your keyword density up, for example?
I do a lot of SEO, and that sounds a bit far-fetched to me - though wolf-alice’s explanation may be a good explanation of how this factoid may have been misinterpreted.
I’ve never heard it mentioned, but you could ask yourself at a more specialized forum - like this one http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
One of the reasons I quit subscribing to a particular online game is because it had a black background, which I’ve always found hard on the eyes. I don’t care whether YOU think it looks better…if a site has a black background, I’ll probably look for another site in the same category. I only have one pair of eyes, and if a site abuses my eyes, I will avoid using it.
And I feel the same way about text over images. That drives me NUTS, and is darn near impossible to read. I don’t care how artistic it is.
I was reading something about why a white background is better than a black one. I don’t remember the exact wording, but towards the end of it was something like “Google will prioritize your site if it has a white background. Click here for more on this secret.” When I was trying to find this article later, I ran across plenty on keyword stuffing, which was the first I’d heard of it, so I don’t think the article I was looking for was talking about that.
If Google priority is based on site hits then people (like me) who HATE dark backgrounds will not visit the sites. Seriously, if a website is difficult to view I’m gone.
I don’t understand how dark backgrounds aren’t easier on the eyes. Each white pixel is a tiny bright light, while a black pixel is essentially off. White backgrounds are shooting an order of magnitude more high-energy photons at your retina than white text on a black background would be. Dark backgrounds are noticeably easier on my eyes in my experience. Of course, I’m the guy who dims his dashboard lights as low as they’ll go when driving at night, too.
Now I’ll agree that image backgrounds are the bane of the internet.
I bought Photoshop Elements for my wife’s picture managing program. She takes a lot of pictures. The program works well but has only two background settings, the default is black but you can change it to grey, I would still prefer white.
Based upon this alone I will not buy a future product from them that is limited to these options. If I can’t get a white background, or at minimum an easily readable contrast to the text, I am going to view the product as sucky no matter how good it works.
I understand that this is not what you are asking about, but your friend should understand and listen to the customer’s concerns and professional website advice. Dark backgrounds and/or colored text are deal killers for some people.
Is this what your potential customers will want? That is the question to ask yourself. Just offering an a opinon, do as you see fit.
I agree that black on white is not necessary, and sometimes gets in the way of the colour combination I’m designing, so I have often designed sites with a “light text on dark background colour” combo. But every time the client would eventually come back and ask for it to be changed to “black text on white.”
Not even “dark colour on light colour”, but always “black on white.” I sometimes find it dazzlingly stark, but the tradition always wins out.
I use light text on dark backgrounds doing my own work in Xwindows environment but (paradoxically?) hate dark backgrounds on websites. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the light backgrounds make reading easier, but I prefer easier on the eyes when I already know what text to expect.
Like some others in the thread, I’ll click away if I see dark background (too many pages, too little time). Once or twice I’ve seen poor-contrast pages I really wanted to read, copied the page, and edited the html to fix the colors.
I’ve my own little website with 1 or 2 image-background pages. But I’ve used a Paint or Shop tool to make the image very light with very little contrast and a color complementary to the text.
I don’t have anything really scientific for you. All I know is that if I read a lot of light text on a dark background, I get a headache. This doesn’t occur if I read dark text on a light background. Since I try to avoid headaches whenever possible, I will avoid sites that have light on dark.
Also, light on black backgrounds looks way too emo/goth to me.
I agree with what Lynn says, for me, it’s the issue of readability of the site. If there is a dark background and bright or light text, I have a really hard time reading it. That said, I don’t necessarily prefer a white background, but dark text with light background is easier on the eye imho.
I sort of see the argument for that, Magiver, if there were a hugely increased bounce rate for a dark page as compared to a white page, then Google might assume it’s irrelevant to the terms and drop it a smidgen, possibly, perhaps.
Google isn’t going to drop your site out of the listings entirely for having a black background, though (as they would if you’d been keyword stuffing or adding sneaky resource layers, say). I’m one Brazilian percent certain on that.
I could maybe see you taking that sort of thing into account if you’re going for really excessively competitive terms (Say, “porn”, I mean, not “cheap hotel missouri”), but for most keyphrases there are so many more non-speculative, proven SEO techniques you should address first. What terms are you targeting, if you don’t mind me asking?
This isn’t just about about photons shooting at your retina. Vision requires your brain, too, and it’s very possible that our brains and eyes must work harder in order to decode the lines, shapes, and edges in little white squigglies on black. Whether this is a result of physiology or that we’ve just been practicing to read black on white since childhood, I can’t say. But to dismiss the argument based solely on what happens in the eyeball is a bit myopic.
Not true.
Google evaluates sites from the text in their HTML code – it doesn’t actually have eyes to ‘see’ the website at all. Backgrounds, colors, images, blinking fonts, rotating icons – none of that is considered at all. Just the text, and links to the site.
Black or dark backgrounds are disliked because they are much harder for most people to read. And you do want people to read the website, after all. There is a reason that after several hundred years experience with printed books, they are almost all printed in black ink on white paper.
I’m a great fan of black (or at least very dark) text on white (or at least very light) background. However, the reason why we print dark on light is because it’s much, much harder to do it the other way around, and more expensive, too. Printing light on a dark background would require something that was either naturally quite dark, or a lot of pigment or ink. And then REMOVING the color would require either masking the text, or bleach. It’s just a heck of a lot easier to print dark text on a light background. But with a display, it’s as easy, or possibly easier, to display light images on a dark background.
