I had a quick look at his website a few weeks later and he’d used two very similar shaded colours. Not quite same colour on same colour but pretty close. Certainly of no benefit to the website visitor.

I gave him a call and told him that the tecniques he had used are considered black hat and unethical and that he was likely to get banned from search engines. His response was that he’d looked at some other websites and they’d done it, so he’d copied them.

This just goes to show that the internet is still suffering from yesteryears bad practice and those do-it-yourself website creators copy whatever is out there, whether it is good or bad.

He did end up taking my advice and took the dodgy black hat text off within a few hours.