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

The same is true of <emp> and <i>.

 

I agree. I've read somewhere that <STRONG> is more preferable when it comes to search engines other than <bold> since this is W3Cs standard.

 

I am not aware of any difference between the 2 types at SEO level. I would be surprised if there was one.

Regards

 

google doesnt even care about it...

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-08-03-n29.html

 

1. They are W3C proposals for standards, NOT standards.

2. Search engines and their spiders don't give a damn about W3C.

3. Neither do most human visitors.

 

Heres one experiment on this at http://london-seo.com/bold-vs-strong-keyword-weight/15/


<b> will render your text as bold
<big> will render your text in a larger font

<strong> is the semantic equivalent to <b>. What does it mean? It means that 'bold' is how the text should visually appear. It's purely cosmetic and bear no meaning. On the other hand, 'strong' carries the meaning that text warp into such a tag is more important. (If it looks the same in your browser, it's simply because your browser's default style for the 'strong' tag is to make the text bold.)

That's where we enter the semantic concept of the web. Visual/cosmetic apperance makes sense for humans but not for machines. How should a machine know that a piece of text is more important than another? With bold, it's not such a big deal, but if you decide that important text is to be blue, normal text black and very important text red. As a human, you may find out, but the machine will never get a clue.

That's why tags such as 'b' and 'i' are depreciated in favor of respectively 'strong' and 'em' tags in XHTML. The purpose behind this is to help machines understand your content. XHTML being a step between HTML and XML.

Anyway, better i keep this short. If you want to know more, search for 'semantic web' in google.

 

Unfortunately, the referenced "experiment" doesn't prove what the author believes it proves, i.e., that Google likes <B> better and MSN likes <STRONG> better.

All it "proves" is that both Google and MSN can recognize duplicate pages when they see them.

And it suggests that <b> versus <strong> is irrelevant.

If you are suggesting that modern spiders are not "smart" enough to understand that <b> and <strong>, and <i> and <em> are equivalent, I'm afraid you're living in that W3C dream world.

 

Looks like you've been following my posts all along buddy. lolz. I never said Google does seriously care about it. I'm talking about "preference" here pal. And that doesn't mean it's bad to use the <bold> either.

I agree with lunchbox when he said "My recommendation is to always follow the recommendations/standards set by the W3C".

 

I think I will let my lazy side chose what to use and if you can't guess it will be <b> because it takes fewer key strokes.

 

Hiya,

I am aware this thread is very old, but I was wondering if they are was any update on this issue?

Cheers,

AA

 

To my knowledge <strong> and <b> still get the same amount of weight in Google's ranking algorithm as does <i> and <em>. Not sure about the other engines. I personally prefer <strong> since it's the w3c recommendation.

 

Using validated code that complies with W3C recommendations has always worked for me. strong and em

 

You get rss readers that complain if you don;t use what the w3c tells you what you;re supposed to use. I'd stick with the strong and em tags.