It looks as if Google’s latest Puffin update is going to have more impact on designers than SEO workers this time.
Any news on where pale grey (ie, like this) fits in? I’m assuming it will be better than white or really dark colours, even if it’s not quite as great as those pastel shades, so we should still be OK with our SEO here on the forums. I’d be really disappointed if not, given how much effort we go to in order to optimise our pages and make sure we’re always at the top of Google.
Long overdue IMO. Loading time is fine and important, but what good is good info if you can’t read it because of weird color schemes, or illegible fonts?
They should put a penalty on autoplay too!
Yep - as I understand it, any pale colour scheme will be acceptable, but the colours listed are considered the best. So technically, I suppose, if two sites are equal in all other respects, but one has a grey colour scheme and the other a pale rose pink, the pink will win out in the rankings.
Exactly.
That’s an excellent point. Hopefully that will come in the next update.
I was delighted when I first heard this news. I’ve always hated dark sites, especially those with tiny white or grey text on a black background - and they seem to be so prevalent these days. My sites all have pale backgrounds, so I’m hoping for a boost in ranking. Most of them are blue, unfortunately, but I do have a couple of pale mauve and a light green, so it will be interesting to see if they fare noticeably better than the blue ones.
Personally, I am SICK AND TIRED of Google’s constant changes in the way they do things.
Please bring us back to “The Good Old Days” when you could simply put appropriate keywords in the meta-tags and be ranked in search based on that!
That’s a good question. I think it might depend on whether the site uses button images, or real text. If it’s simply an image, I don’t think Google would be able to judge the text size, and hence the readability. But I’m sure I saw somewhere that font size would also be taken into account. Hopefully that means that they’ll look at sites to see whether the base font size is set to 100%, to respect the visitors’ preferences or not.
Edit: That’s strange. The post above seems to have changed while I was replying to it.
Don’t worry about it - it happens to me all the time.
And I agree with you about font size. I’d love to see sites respect my browser’s font size settings, and not reset everything to a size to suit their requirements, not mine.
Thanks for posting this, TechnoBear. Only one issue: Did you forget to tell us the date of the announcement?
Mike
Google quite often makes MAJOR announcements on this date. It appears to be an Anniversary of some type; or, perhaps, they simply like the mathematical symmetry of it.
Depending upon what part of the world you live it is either:
- 4-1-14
- 1-4-14
hehe - and I hear that in 12 months time preference will be given to sites utilizing Google Web Fonts… 
With this new I have to optimize my site now! :). Could you send me the source news please?
Well, I am relieved I shouldn’t have to do as much work as I thought I might need to do.
But I would like to know if anyone has sites that have been hit by this puffin update, did you need to change table tags to get the site PR back?
Yes, I have a site that was badly hit. It went from the top page of Google to the 115th page.
But it was nothing to do with table tags. The problem was the colour scheme, which was essentiallly just black and white, with the links in blue. But now I’ve changed the background to mint green, with the main text in dark brown, and the headlines in gold. That seems to have been successful, because the site is now back on the first page.
Mint green is definitely the way to go.
This all happened since Tuesday of this week.
Mike
That’s pretty crazy that your site was affected so quickly. Yikes, they don’t give you much time to get around to fixing it. I guess these are pretty old techniques anyways in terms of designing sites.
“Timing is everything”
Am I the only one thats like WTF? Its user and a personal preference to a color scheme you prefer. I personally like a dark background and dont have any problems with well designed sites that also use dark colors. We use a dark background on our site and I noticed a decline in impressions last week.
Does anyone have a LINK to the source of this?
I Googled the exact text but got 0 hits. Seems this forum post is the only indexed sourced of this info. Until a source is posted Im calling April Foolz…
Google just looking to have a monopoly on SEO, so many changes made to frustrate the work of SEO. <snip/>