<b> VS. <strong>

[tarr74]

Have you ever got to know is Google gives more importance either to <b> or to <strong>?

[siteseo]

<strong> is better.

[Chuck Norris]

Why better? I can't undestand it. I thing this kind of things are not important.

[caveman]

<strong> is better

And you base this on ... what?

[trimmer80]

on the same topic. I was wondering this the other day. If you css your formatting do you run the risk of losing the effect of bolding.
eg.
<span class='custombold'>Boldtext</span>

the class custombold is a bold with a couple of other attributes. Does anybody know if this is not counted as a bold as the styles are in an external css.

I am guessing it wont count and thus would like to know if this would get counted

<b class='custombold'>Boldtext</b> still uses the <b> but still worried the class attribute will result in Google not counting it as a bold.

[reseller]

siteseo

"<strong> is better."

Any specific reason?

Thanks.

[nuevojefe]

on the same topic. I was wondering this the other day. If you css your formatting do you run the risk of losing the effect of bolding.

No, not until G uses rendering. (although some guru here might chew me out for being wrong, I'm pretty damn sure you'll not get any weighting that the bold/strong might normally add.

[brunner]

<b> and <strong> are conceptually different.
The former is just a formatting tag, while the latter carries semantic weight, it tells google that the specific words between those tags are ..well.. more important :) For example, a screenreader would differentiate the strong phrase from the rest (and should ignore <b>, being a display tag)
With the current move to separating code from presentation, and especially in the light of google's new semantic algorithms, i say you should drop <b>/<i> (which are redundant anyway, when using css) and go with <strong>/<em>.

[trimmer80]

brunner - welcome to webmaster world.
interesting stuff. Do you have any sources i can read on this. Very interested.

[trimmer80]

here is some info I found:
[tlt.its.psu.edu...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[Lord Majestic]

While in theory STRONG can carry more meaning than B, in effect B is often used to mean that STRONG really should have meant. From a search engine point of view there is no way to know whether B was used as B or just as substribute for STRONG. Because you don't know that, and because B is way way more popular it makes sense to assign them exactly the same weight.

[trimmer80]

Agreed Lord,
I would make exactly the same assumption. But as assumptions are the root of all evil, I am going to use strong and em now just in case.

[Lord Majestic]

I am going to use strong and em now just in case.

I suppose you are making wise bet as any serious search engine should recognise STRONG tag and value it at least as high as B tag, by itself STRONG tag should not be a strong indicator of excessive SEOing :)

[trimmer80]

I would be really interested in the semantic component of this. For instance how placing using emphasis on non keywords affects the related keyword.
If I have the text -

"you must buy this purple widget"

the emphasis is placed on "must" but the relevance of that is actually on purple widgets.

Reckon google is smart enough for this yet?

[Lord Majestic]

the emphasis is placed on "must" but the relevance of that is actually on purple widgets.

Frequency of words help - must is way too common, so this emphasis might just be ignored alltogether.

[encyclo]

Another long thread about the difference between

<b>

and

<strong>

here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

brunner mentions the semantic aspect of

<strong>

and the meaningless of

<b>

in terms of screenreaders (and welcome to WebmasterWorld brunner!). Whereas in fact most screenreaders blithely ignore both elements, as the original question was the importance for SEO you could argue that because your bolded text is more for the benefit of ranking rather than users then the semantically-meaningless

<b>

would be actually more appropriate. Bear in mind that both elements are valid markup in all current standards, transitional or strict.

As for whether the SEs give extra weight to text within

<b>

or

<strong>

tags, the former is far more widespread than the latter, but I know of no real hard evidence either way of their respective effects in terms of better ranking. Any influence would be minimal, so don't get too caught up on it: concentrate your work on other more important areas such as writing content and link-building.

[Reid]

If you css your formatting do you run the risk of losing the effect of bolding.
eg.
<span class='custombold'>Boldtext</span>
the class custombold is a bold with a couple of other attributes. Does anybody know if this is not counted as a bold as the styles are in an external css.

I am guessing it wont count and thus would like to know if this would get counted

<b class='custombold'>Boldtext</b> still uses the <b> but still worried the class attribute will result in Google not counting it as a bold.

<span class='custombold'>Boldtext</span>
This would count as normal text. or maybe a 'span' is counted as something 'emphasised' or 'set apart' from the other text. This could be a topic on it's own - how does google interpret <span>
From now on when someone starts a <b> vs <strong> thread they should include <span> (which is different than <div>)
You know we can only guess and assume about these things right?

<b class='custombold'>Boldtext</b>
This would count as <b>
Just as <h1 class='customhtag'> would still be <h1>