<strong>'s font-weight...important?

[JesseM]

I've always wondered about this. First of all, the SEs consider <strong> AND <b> of *equal* importance, right?

I don't know if it's me, in fact, I've seen someone mention it before, but I get really annoyed when I see someone bold words/key words just for the sake of the search engines. It's silly, but it just does.

Is there anything saying that if <strong> is styled to set the font-weight to either 500 or 700 -- whichever is the regular weight -- that the SEs wouldn't see it as important? Would they even track that?

Then, if you needed to stress something of importance to your readers, you could use <b> (not sure how this will work if it's automatically corrected, like in WordPress, but you could always style another un-deprecated tag bold).

I doubt I explained this to the best of my ability, but it's not so bad you won't be able to reply... right? lol

heh, when setting the tags it misses a semi-colon sanitizing the character '<'.

[mashedtomato123]

I've heard that strong counts more than b, nowadays. I don't know why, it doesn't make sense since they show up the same, but that's the way it goes.

I don't know about the font weight, but I don't think it would have any impact.

[IowaGal]

Hi Jesse -

Personally I think it's just splitting hairs. Either way when search engines find the page and see that a keyword or phrase sticks out it's still considered *a little* important.

It's not going to make a huge difference in ranking.

That said, if you do decide to bold (strong) a keyword, make sure that it sticks out because it's important. Not just for the sake of the search engines.

- Kristine

[askloz]

There is a video made by matt cutts about a year ago, he first stated that B tags hold more weight, not a lot, just a little more than the 'strong' tag... then later corrected himself after speaking with a technician at google that they hold the same weight...

Now, whether this was a public stunt to put ppl into that thinking mode who is right and who is wrong, I don't know...

personally, I feel that B tags hold more weight since there are less characters needed to display the boldness of the words you are highlighting, plus the page size becomes smaller... larger the page size, weighs down the processing speed for ranking. That may be all well and good for small sites that aren't very authoritiative in nature, but larger sites, I guess they wont notice the difference in the ranking process.

Originally Posted by mashedtomato123

I've heard that strong counts more than b, nowadays. I don't know why, it doesn't make sense since they show up the same, but that's the way it goes.

I don't know about the font weight, but I don't think it would have any impact.

[JesseM]

mashedtomato123, yeah and it seems like more of the standards-compliant obsessive Web designers/developers push strong over b.

askloz, You could say 'b' holds more weight because it's been around longer (right?), and more people use it. But then, you could say 'strong' holds more weight because it's newer (again, right?) and seems to be regarded as the correct way in the web dev community. Of course, you could also say Matt Cutts didn't lie and the Google tech was right.

Why must the enternets be so confusing... wasn't the universe enough?

IowaGal, it's always nice to know as much possible on a specific subject, but you're probably right - however I'd also like every advantage possible.

Thanks for all of the input!

[askloz]

Originally Posted by JesseM

askloz, You could say 'b' holds more weight because it's been around longer (right?), and more people use it. But then, you could say 'strong' holds more weight because it's newer (again, right?) and seems to be regarded as the correct way in the web dev community. Of course, you could also say Matt Cutts didn't lie and the Google tech was right.

I never said that, read my post again.

[DavidTheMavin]

Well to answer your question, NO they are not "important". They play a very small part in onsite seo, but when you combine all these small parts you definitely will see some progress.

[JesseM]

"You" wasn't talking about "you" if you know what I mean. I was outlining all of the possibilities for my sake I guess.

edit: Quick replying to an individual post doesn't quick reply to an individual post, apparently. I was talking to askloz.