is there any real difference to the way the search engines give you page rank when they see one or the other?
PageRank is an indication of the number and quality of inbound links to a site only. It has nothing to do with anything on the page itself.
Maybe, maybe, you could make the argument that using certain tags raises a page's quality/relevence in the eyes of Google, if you're talking about items like titles, headings and alt text. So in this very indirect sense, perhaps your own site's page rank can be affected by the quality of another site based on proper use of tags. The effect would be miniscule, if at all, and <strong>/<b> are certainly not amongst those tags that make a difference in page quality or SE ranking.
Strong is the precursor of B. Altough B is not deprecated in HTML 4 or XHTML 1.0, it's better to use CSS. As Net said... It has nothing to do with Pagerank. It's just a formatting HTML tag. Search engines do not favour one or another at all.
Jeez, you guys are no fun. And here I was looking for someone to take off on the fact that scylla used the plural search engines, and mentioned 'page rank', specific to one... FLAN is right, in the post linked. <em> and <strong> are used to describe a specific portion of text. <b> is to make the text bold, <i> sets the type to italic. That said, there is a bit of a boost to be gained by using all these with keywords or data - search terms. As to what gives a better boost in search engines, <b> or <strong>, it seems that <b> is the choice tag by most search engines. Either of these two are better than simply changing font, color, class, etc. and that seems to be the logic of the search engines. But from there, we get into doctype declarations, valid code, etc. giving a boost... The very best advice here is to validate your code and write for the visitor. If there is something you want all visitors to focus on, use <b> or <i>. If the color, font, size, etc. are what you wish to use (bells and whistles, fanciness) to attract attention, <strong> and <em> are the better choice. There are other tags this logic could be applied to quite easily. You should also consider the fact that the vistor could be human or robotic...
What are you basing that conclusion on? Those two sentences are backwards. If there is something you want all visitors to focus on, i.e., emphasize, use EM or STRONG. If the font weight or style is what you wish to change, use B or I—though CSS should be used instead.
This is right. The strong tag have a little bit more wheight for some SE. A little advice: a good CMS will always use strong