Google widely testing the title links in black, instead of the traditional blue hyperlink color

Over the weekend, Google began testing a widely noticed change to their search results listing page by changing the color of the titles in the search results listings snippet from the traditional blue color to black.

Here is one of the many pictures and screen shots of this in action, this one is from @matibarnes:

Compare the above screen shot to what most people see, the blue links, and you can see why so many people are complaining:

We emailed Google for a comment about this on Saturday, but we have yet to hear back. I suspect the response will be something like “We are constantly testing new ways to improve the user experience, and this is just one of those many tests.”

Overall, the feedback that we’ve been hearing about the change in the color of the link is mostly negative.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.