question about bolding keywords

[MelissaRWE]

on our ecommerce website, we have chosen a few products to test bolding keywords.

What we did was insert <b></b> code around a certain phrase. We did this in a natural way that would make sense to a user..

However, the issue we have now is, when those products show up in Google results the description shows the <b></b> code.

I have 2 questions.
1.Am I using the wrong code? is there another version of bolding code that will not appear in the search result description.
2. If we remove this bold text will Google penalize us for altering our content as we have don't this to some products that have been online for years as well as a few new products we have uploaded as recently as today.


Thank you for any help you can give me!

[piatkow]

Are you talking about keywords in the body of the page or within the Description or Title tags in the header?

[lammert]

If your ecommerce site is built using a standard software package, it could be that the <b> are automatically translated to other codes when they are stored in the internal database. The reason of this kind of filtering is that if users have the ability to add this kind of innocent HTML codes to texts, they may also be able to add harmful codes which execute scripts etc. Often the starting < is translated to the HTML entity &lt; which when printed on the screen gives a less-than sign.

[piatkow]

From the original post it sounds as if she is seeing the codes in the SERPS but not on the site itself. That's why I thought she might be trying to use the codes in the header rather than in the body.

Certainly if you type html in a wysiwyg editor it will convert them to entity values but that will show whenever the site is viewed. I think MelissaRWE needs to give us a little more detail about the problem.

[MelissaRWE]

My apologies for not being able to be more technical with my question. I'm not a programmer by any means. When we enter our product descriptions, we do this from an admin panel where we do not see or have the ability to change any of the html on the page.

the <b> code does work on the site, when a user comes in to look at a page, the words i have bolded in the admin panel appear bold to the user, but it the serp description, the searcher will see the tags.

From what I gather this is unusual and Google should know to strip all html out.

[encyclo]

You probably have the following code:

<meta name="description" content="here is a <b>bold</b> keyword">

In other words, your description is being echoed in the meta description element, which should never contain HTML. You CMS may also escape the bold tags like this:

<meta name="description" content="here is a &lt;b&gt;bold&lt;/b&gt; keyword">

In either case, the fix depends on what your "admin panel" (I assume a content-management system) is based on. The bug is not with Google, but with your site.