Does keyword Bold, Italic, Underline work for SEO post Panda?

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[Taqwaconsulting]

Hi All,

I have been using the concept of bolding my keywords in an article on my sites and it worked for me well, bringing huge traffic. But then post panda, my sites got struck massively. There was huge junk content on it, apart from keywords in bold. But keyword density was always 2% or around.

Now i couldn't make out whether Panda penalized my sites because of the keywords being bold or whether some of its content was junk. Anyways, my traffic reduced to 30% now. But then, keyword is still bold on those articles that are performing well even after Panda and Penguin updates.

So whats with this keyword bolding, italicizing or underlying? Do they work positive or have negative effect on SEO in post panda world?

Please discuss this in detail to clarify.

[lucy24]

Well, you can dump <u>. It will be taking on a whole new meaning in HTML 5 :)

If you're talking about bolding or italicizing your keywords wherever they happen to appear, just because you want them to be perceived* as keywords, it sounds a bit...

:: wandering off to think of tactful word ::


* Remember, you're dealing with an entity that considers "it's" a keyword, even if you're not selling ice cream sandwiches in San Francisco. Look far enough down my own list and you'll find four separate variants of "and".

[Taqwaconsulting]

So does it mean it won't have any affect at all if i bold my keyword? I mean if it has negative impact, why are some articles doing so good with bold in it,,,while some are penalized. There has to be other reason which caused the articles to fail.

If it was bolding a keyword (if it is considered as keyword stuffing) then all the articles should get affected.

Am i right?

[Andy Langton]

Bolding keywords is good practice in terms of online copywriting, since it makes text more "scannable" - and remember that users don't tend to read all of your text. Similarly, if they search for something in Google and immediately see their keywords or related words in bold, they are more likely to see that the site is relevant.

But if you're bolding keywords just for the sake of it, and particularly if you're using a "checklist" style approach to SEO (e.g. same keyword in title, heading, URL, first paragraph etc. etc.) then you might want to consider a more natural approach.