does google penalise small fonts?

[mit74]

I've been looking at a customers websites recently and noticed they're using 12px font size. When I mention this to them and suggest a larger font of 14 or 16 they seemed reluctant to change it and thought it looked good. My experience would say Google would penalise small font on all the site based on accessibilty guidelines (if it didn't have a font resizer). If I mentioned this to them would I be correct?

 

[Ali-v-8]

Very small font - Yes. Way back it was classed as a Blackhat way to stuff keyword into a website - Google penalised matching the font colour with back ground colour in the same way.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

fontsize = 0 was a great way to have text on a page that people couldn't see (if you were a spammer.

Google will look at block level analysis and if there is a chunk of spammy text in a very small font then yep, it will raise a flag. but not 12px, how could they? on a 640 x 480 that would be huge.

 

[mit74]

okay thanks

 

[pete.mcal]

As said above unless you are deliberately using font size to mask keyword stuffing and manipulate the on page SEO I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Just as a point of interest, never try and "hide" keywords on a page it's bad practice and has long since been penalised and no longer works.

Think of the user first. Just display your page in the way that flows/looks the best.

Best of luck.

 

[njoo]

I do think that smaller text will warrant less influence as far as page content though. Kind of like the importance of H1 going to least important to h6

 

[pete.mcal]

I do think that smaller text will warrant less influence as far as page content though. Kind of like the importance of H1 going to least important to h6

Perhaps there is some truth to this, but I've never seen any evidence for it. As far as I'm aware search engines are starting to progress towards looking for semantic markup signals. This is done in simple terms by analysing the text to figure out the importance of certain terms/sections by reading semantic html markup. Font size is standard mark up and has no inherent semantic meaning.

Also I've read that only <h1> has any noticeable impact in terms of on page seo. The other header tags are no so much lessening in importance but just all given the same tiny value by the search algorithms (however I may be wrong here I'm just going from memory of what I've read).

 

[njoo]

As far as I'm aware search engines are starting to progress towards looking for semantic markup signals....
...Font size is standard mark up and has no inherent semantic meaning.

Exactly. I am a believer of doing your best to "future proof" things that you do. But I beg to differ as far as the semantic value of font size. I see it as something like how people think ALL CAPS means shouting.

 

[cmcp]

12px or equivaleant ems propotion size is fine for users and accessibility, and in turn big G.

 

[siljajoseph]

It's true that if you are posting content in a font size that is hard or impossible to read, you may be penalized. For example, it takes at least an 8px font size to render all the lowercase letters reperly, so anything smaller than that is definitely a problem.

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

Exactly. I am a believer of doing your best to "future proof" things that you do. But I beg to differ as far as the semantic value of font size. I see it as something like how people think ALL CAPS means shouting.

I don't understand your reasoning.

 

[njoo]

I don't understand your reasoning.

My reasoning is that the meaning of the following lines can be interpreted differently:

Do you like me?

Do you LIKE me?

DO YOU LIKE ME?

You can take the intensity of final line even further by increasing font size.

DO YOU LIKE ME?

If you had a body of text and within the paragraph, a group of words are in larger font, it can be an indication of emphasis.

If search engines are implementing semantics, I would assume internet/chat lingo and their meaning is being taken into consideration.

But this is a bit far off from OP's original question

 

[Ali-v-8]

Was off topic, but good response all the same.
I will agree font size in CONVERSATION (capitals) is shouting.
However over use of capitals could be classed as spam (in metas, content, titles, blog post,..etc.)
Highlighting using Bold or Underlining can emphasise selling points (and used to be an SEO tool years ago)

Font size is however important - You should be aware that displaying content in an unclear format and small size can be grounds for miss selling and claw-backs from credit card companies and currently finance industry is getting hammered with refunds due to simple font sizes being challenged.

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

My reasoning is that the meaning of the following lines can be interpreted differently:

Do you like me?

Do you LIKE me?

DO YOU LIKE ME?

You can take the intensity of final line even further by increasing font size.

DO YOU LIKE ME?

If you had a body of text and within the paragraph, a group of words are in larger font, it can be an indication of emphasis.

If search engines are implementing semantics, I would assume internet/chat lingo and their meaning is being taken into consideration.

But this is a bit far off from OP's original question

What I meant is I didn't understand your reasoning in response to the OP's topic...it just confused me that you went off topic but that's ok...my mind wanders off into usability too all of the time.

To answer your question - yes I like you...very much