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My question is: will it make any difference if link text size is defined in the html code
eg <font size="3"><b><a href="page.htm">page</a></b></font>
or if link text attributes are defined via external css?
eg (in the stylesheet) a.links {font-size: 14 px; font-weight: bold}
(in the main document) <a href="page.htm" class="link">page</a>
Does Google give more weighting to the first example because it can see straightaway that it's big and bold?
Cheers,
Grimy
Welcome to webmasterworld :)
Using larger fonts and bold tags may help to emphasise certain words on your page, from an SEO viewpoint. But the benefit, if there is any, is of very little importance.
On the other hand, at the moment, Google doesn't index CSS at all, and so any changes there won't be picked up by Googlebot.
That said, you may want to consider the many benefits of putting the style aspects of your html in a stylesheet. This results in much cleaner, spider-friendly code which offers much more control of your page than <font> tags ever could.
You should also note that the <font> tag is depreciated, which means that at some point in the future browsers will stop supporting it, although I doubt that will be in the forseeable future.