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Accidental Spamming by using tables in your web
design
There are many concerns that you should have when you use tables
in your web site design. One concern that is overlooked quite
often by well-meaning designers who are trying very hard to use
'white-hat' methods is accidental spamming.
Accidental spamming occurs because tables allow you set a
background for each cell. Many designers use this
feature to set the cell's background color rather than setting the
entire page's background color.
Lets use the example of a page with a typical white background
color and a table. The designer sets the background color of
one of the cells to red and then used white text for users to
read. The code may look something like this:
<body
bgcolor="#ffffff"> <!-- background of the body is white
--> <table> <tr> <td
bgcolor="#ff0000"> <!-- background of the table cell is red
--> <font
color="#ffffff">This is the white text in the
cell!</font> </td> </tr> </table>
While the site's visitors may have no problem
reading the text in the cell, the text inside the cell is the same
color as the main page background. A search engine's spider
may consider it spamming because the
designer is trying to use the same color text and page
background.
You have to remember that the spider is just a
machine and may be coded to think that the designer is trying to
hide the text! This may cause your site to be penalized
pretty severely.
But I like the way my site looks!
After taking a look at your site(s) you may find
that you may be accidentally spamming the Search Engines. If
you want to keep the same look and feel and avoid the possible
penalty to your rankings, use CSS instead:
<style
type="text/css">
// let's define the class
.whitetext
{
Color:#ffffff;
}
</style>
… then when it comes to our text:
<span
class="whitetext">
This technique, so far, works very well for keeping the
formatting that you like without the spiders thinking you are
spamming.
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