We all know that you're not supposed to cloak text by using the same color for text and background. But what about contrasting shades of the same color? For example, is dark blue text on a light blue background okay, or could this be flagged by the bots as cloaking if the contrast isn't high enough? Must the text be an entirely different color from the bg (e.g. black text on light blue)?

If you really want to play it safe the color number of the text should be 3 digits different from the background.

I don't think you should worry about the text. I see alot of sites that perfectly good PageRanks use hidden text.

I read somewhere that you should only use a given keyword no more than six times per page, and sometimes not more than 5.

I'm trying a same color background and text with one of my site just to see what happens.

When you see the word cloaking it usually reffers to making your website look like it has more pages. Like There are actually 100 pages and there are 30,000 fake pages. All the pages link back to home. Thus artificially inflating the link popularity and altering the site ranking substancially.

Gateway pages and cloaking are obsolete marketing techniuqes.

i'm pretty sure dark blue text on light blue background is ok. as long as you can see the text fine - it should be no problem.