<span class> rather than <b> - any difference to bot?

[Richie]

I use <span class="">HeEader</span> tags to define bold headings and text on my site with an external CSS file.

I think google picks up on bold text and recognises it as a good keyword for the page(?).

So would converting it all to the usual <b> tags make any difference to the PR of my site and position in results on google?

[Nick_W]

The <span class="bold">bold text</span> issue huh?

Personally I try to avoid that at all costs but use <strong> and <em> whenever they make sense in the context they are written in.

Google doesn't crawl external CSS so it won't know what you're dooing with those classes. It may pick up the <strong> and <em> tags and weight them though.

Personally, I'd not worry too much about it and just concentrate on making good solid (X)HTML pages that make sense to your users...

Nick

[Mohamed_E]

Google gives extra weight to words in bold, which many of us assume to include both <B> and <STRONG>, though there is some uncertainty about <STRONG>.

Currently it is probable that Google does not routinely use CSS, as CSS is for presentation while Google searches for content. So I suspect that something boldened with CSS would not be treated as bold by Google.

So you would probably lose the "points for bold" by moving to CSS. Just remember that Google uses over 100 variables in computing the score for your page, so it is up to you to decide whether the convenience of CSS is worth the probably small loss of ranking.

Also note that Page Rank has nothing to do with the content of your page, it is entirely determined by the links to you. So it would not be affected in any way.

[Splosh]

<b> or <strong>, <i> or <em>. Does Google have any preference or do both versions on Bold and Italic carry the same weight?

[pageoneresults]

I'm currently putting this theory to a test. I built a site about a year ago where I used <span class="b22"> to achieve bold blue type where needed.

After a year of being buried in css topics here and reading the W3C and other authoritative resources, I just did a find and replace on over 200 pages replacing those <span> tags with <strong> tags, there were quite a few of them.

The only time I will use <span> now is when I need to color text in normal mode <span class="blue">. If I need bold text in blue, I now do this <strong class="blue>. I'm using a generic color class so that the blue can be used on various elements.

.blue{color:#369;background:transparent;}

And then, if I need to use the color on any other elements, I can use multiple classes on one element like this...

<p class="sm blue">

That will give me a paragraph with small text that is in blue. I picked up the combined classes here recently from grahamstewart, an excellent tip!

How to specify multiple classes for one element. [webmasterworld.com]

[IITian]

I too was using CSS for all my formatting including bold format. To bad that because Google crawler is not smart enough to read my CSS files, I am going to insert some of my formatting the the html files.

[seoRank]

Text styling has NO impact on PR. PR is a function of incoming links. However, text styling DOES have an impact on the keyword relevance.

H1 tags, bold, strong, italics, underline and other text styling tags are used by google algo to figure out the importance of the content just like you would convey to a human visitor. However, I would advise against highlighting ALL the content. When you do that, you are really not highlighting anything in effect.

[Nick_W]

Wise words from seorank.

I'd not worry about it much, if you really think about it it's a bit silly, and I'm sure google don't pay that much attention to it. However, as soon as you do whatever you do with that data p1, you better spill it! ;)

Nick