Bolding Phrases/Words and Linking

[pdvor4]

I write a lot of pages where I bold certain elements of the paragraph to emphasize the importance of that term in relation to the page it's on. But if I bold something and then link it to another page on my site, does the relevancy of that term drop or does it simply place the emphasis on both pages?

IE:

Lorem Ipsum is <b>simply dummy text<b> of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into <a href="somesite.com"><b>electronic</b></a> typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.

Do both elements place emphasis on the page its on or does one place more emphasis than another?

[tedster]

Anchor text is more a stronger Google signal than bold text, and yes, it's a signal for both the page it appears on and for the link target page.

But today's algo is more holistic than the kind of "add up the scorecard" approach that search engines used in the -90s, so it's hard to give the kind of quantitative answer you seem to be asking for.

If you aren't yet familiar with Google's phrase-based indexing patents [webmasterworld.com], I suggest a bit of study.

[Nuttakorn]

To bold the phase or important text is important as search engine view and also reader that highlight important of keyword but it should check the balance of that as well, it seems that you need to under stand the nature of people when they are reading, if there are too much , i think search engine will consider as well.

[tangor]

Pretty sure emphasis such as bold, italic, are not considered. The TEXT is. About all I can say is overuse of either merely turns me off and I go elsewhere.

[tedster]

Note the following from Google's 2006 patent on Spam Detection Based on Phrase Indexing [webmasterworld.com]. In this context, Google is discussing factors they might measure to set the threshold for spam (over-optimization) penalties:

[0042] ...grammatical or format markers, for example by being in boldface, or underline, or as anchor text in a hyperlink, or in quotation marks.

[0133] ...whether the occurrence is a title, bold, a heading, in a URL, in the body, in a sidebar, in a footer, in an advertisement, capitalized, or in some other type of HTML markup.

[potentialgeek]

Bold isn't really a strong enough signal. It's not noise free. Some webmasters bold words so they stand out on a page as part of a basic usability method; while other webmasters do it trying to score ranking points. How is Google supposed to figure out the difference between the two?

A webmaster on this forum if memory serves recently said he was penalized by Google for bolding most if not all of an entire page.

I wouldn't bother using bold as a way to score ranking points. Even if Google gives it some value, it would be so minimal it may not even affect ranking. It has to be near the bottom of a long list of things Google uses to evaluate page or site value.

I don't think any of my webpages that use bolding for anchor text get penalized or helped (unless it overuses many other optimization techniques at the same time). I bold many text links but only for usability.

You're more likely to get penalized with the 950 penalty for overusing a particular word in text links on one page versus bolding all the links.

p/g