<b> vs. <strong> any SEO difference?

I've noticed that blogger likes to use <strong> over <b>. Has anyone seen any testing utilizing both tags and which SE's prefer, or does it not matter in SEOing?

 

i lot of things prefer <strong> to <b> nowadyas including macromedia dreamweaver and that.

i really dont think it makes a difference

 

i use strong when im not too lazy to type it out, otherwise i just bold it. i can't see a difference between them at all.

 

<STRONG> is the W3C standard, as is <EM> versus <I>..... don't know if that makes a difference or not.

 

Yes, there is a noticeable difference between <b> and <strong>. Although <b> is considered deprecated,Yahoo still gives a higher rank to your keywords that also appear in the body copy as <b> while Google does not consider the attribute in it's algorithm at all.

 

So then lunchbox, would you say it is better to use <strong> over <b>?

 

Well, if Yahoo gives it a higher rank to <b> (I'd like to see some evidence of this) and Google doesn't care, wouldn't you say <b> would be better than <strong> for SEO purposes?

 

I've never seen anything to suggest that SEs care one way or the other. It's another one of those silly W3C notions about one being "the recommended standard" and the other being "deprecated". In reality, no one careds except W3C and a few web designers who think the "suggested standards" are important.

 

I think google bot and other bots are intelligent enough to see both are same. So it doesnt matter which one you are using. If u go for character count (which is an important part coz bots gulp in specified amounts of data first, process it, then the next .. keeping your caharatcer count minimum can make your page processed, indexed and follwoed fast) go for <b>

 

Hey gazelle - My recommendation is to always follow the recommendations/standards set by the W3C.

The ongoing debate is continuing in just about every forum I have viewed online regarding SEO, and quite a few folks are conducting a series of experiments with <strong> versus <b>, and <h1> versus <b>.

Check out a more in depth discussion at highrankings forum

 

1. Why? Especially when it comes to <B> vs <strong> and the like? What is served by doing so?

2. They are not standards. They are recommendations, some dating back 5 or 6 years and they still haven't been universally adopted.

 

The principle is that there could be a difference in client-side rendering between bold and strong, and between italic and emphasized; that (apparently) no browser yet makes that distinction does not mean that none ever will.

Boldface means just what it says: it is a particular effect in the type; the same is so of italics. What "strong" and "emphasized" might mean, or someday be rendered as, is not as well-defined as bold and italic.

What I do, because it seems the safest way to go about things, is use i and b for those rare occasions when I explicitly want that print effect (usually it's i for things like quotations), and "strong" and "emphasized' for everything else. That way, if we wake up one fine morning (or, in my case, afternoon) to discover that Brand X browser is now distinguishing, we aren't caught with our pants down (so to speak).

 

Seems highly unlikely to me that any browser that cares even a mite about market penetration would explicitly exclude rendering of <B> and <I> -- that would be shooting the browser in the foot before it was even released.

 

W3C seems like a nice idea until you try to apply it to your site.

I have many sites that function perfectly well but only a few actually 'validate'. Designing a site that validates is the idea but it takes a whole lot of extra time and sometimes I just don't know if it is worth is. You have to put all your table stuff in css, etc.

Anyone else feel this way?

btw I have never read anything that suggests <b> or <strong> is better that the other. I think <b> has been around longer(?) therefor some people are just still using it out of habbit.

 

I agree, but I don't believe that's the issue. I haven't looked in at W3C, so I may err here, but it is my understanding that strong and emphasized supersede bold and italic for general text markup, not utterly; that is, bold and italic remain perfactly valid markup, but are intended for use only when those exact effects are wanted, as opposed to some generic "strong" or "emphasized" text. They live in parallel: one pair does not exclude the other. They are just--by W3C standards--intended for different purposes.

A browser that someday does "strong" in some way other than simple boldface would continue to render boldface as just that--boldface--and likewise with italics and "emphasized".

 

If you actually look at the HTML and XHTML specs, you will see that <b> is not depreciated. The only spec where it is not valid is XHTML Basic, which is used only in cell phones and some PDAs.

<b> and <strong> serve different purposes and are not interchangeable. Search for my posts in the 8457 thread for details.

J.D.

 

Not at all so.

First, your sites that "function perfectly well" will, whether they validate or not, doubtless look different in different browsers. I design using Firefox, which is rigorously compliant, and am often horrified when I finally get to see the pages in IE, which can butcher the simplest things rather badly. But if you are 100% to standard, you have two things going for you:

First, of course, in any properly designed browser, you know they will look right. (I am unsure of this, but I believe there are sites where you can see a page as various different browsers would render it, so you can see what, for example, IE is doing with your good code; I need to check on that.)

Second, when you know your pages are all suposed to be compliant, you can send them nightly through the validator (I have a small package that facilitates doing that automatically), so that if you make a "trifling" chaneg to a page that screws it up, you will at once see that there is a problem and what the problem is.

Moreover, crafting HTML to standard is no strain at all, and I can assure you that you do not need to use CSS. What you do need to do is select a level to meet--I recommend XHTML 1.0 Transitional, because soon or late we'll all need to be XHTML compliant--and meet it. The biggest single change from older styles is making sure that every HTML tag is closed, which is not devastingly difficult to do.

It also, in the end, makes HTML that is easier to read and follow (at least if you use a little common sense in your code layout and indenting): it is a lot easier to follow, for example, lists within lists when every li has an explicit close.

 

google doesnt care as much about on page optimization, yet msn and yahoo - thats a diff. story - <b> is your answer

 

As far as Google is concerned, it doesn't matter. Matt Cutts was shown the actual code that Google use, and both forms are treated identically. Read the transcript of his video:

Cryo.

 

Using strong or Bold doesn't matter at all. They are the same in the eyes of SE.!