I am using this as my reference for this question: None of your keywords are in bold! The fact that you put a certain keyword or phrase in bold tells the search engine that you place an emphasis on it. Naturally it considers these words or phrases to be more important than those in regular font. We recommend that you put your key phrase in bold one or more times. What I am wondering is if the googlebot takes the formating from the style sheet into consideration when it is scanning and indexing the pages. There are a few instances when my keyword on the page is in H2 tags, if I put a font-weight: bold; into the style sheet will the googlebot see this as a bolded keyword?
No, from what I've seen in testing myself and heard from others I respect you need to use the actual html code around the text itself. However, you don't need to bold your heading tags.
Use H1 and H2 tags, etc. Google does recognize them. You can set the size of font for the tags in your style sheet.
That's what we do use here and still got the error message for not having keywords in bold. That's why i was wondering if the font-weight:bold; was hard coded into the <h1> tag in the stylesheet if google would pick that up, because that was just recently added.
They don't individually go through the CSS files. If that was the case, people would start optimizing the CSS as well. What ever emphasis you place (H2, bold or strong) for the page it will pick it up. Search engines don't try to "confirm" with CSS for those changes or modifications. What you are trying to do is called "over-riding" or "over-writing" the previous format. The search engine would take it as a "bold" instance with H2. Again, I would suggest stop digging deep into On-Page that much, its not worth it. Do a good on page, get keyword relevance and start link building and you shall see improvements. Thank you
thank you for the help. The only reaason i brought up the question is I am going through a list of things that googlebot found to be issues on our site here. That was one of them so I just didnt know if it actually took the formatting of the stylesheet into consideration. Thank You
For some time there has been a rumor that Google ignores CSS files due to the heavy use of "black hat". Since CSS is cosmetic, and Google is looking for text, this would make sense. There is also another point to consider, CSS is a "client side" operation and Google does not do client side. We use very heavy CSS (external files) in our web designs but for any SEO requirement, we hard code everything in HTML. Also, we benchmarked the <b>, <strong>, <bold>, <em>, etc. and found that it does not make that much difference for it to become a SEO technique. I use <b> for everything because it uses less characters. But, you are using inline style sheet code, and we didn't test for that. From an SEO standpoint, I would use HTML commands before inline style sheet code.