Several HTML elements format text so that website visitors and search engine crawlers can easily identify important pieces of content.
But can these factors affect your ranking in search?
Read on to find out if text formatting is a Google ranking factor.
[Recommended Read:] The Complete Guide to Google Ranking Factors
Claim: Formatting Text as a Ranking Factor
You can use HTML elements to format text in various ways. for example:
- Bold text using .
- to indicate importance, seriousness, or urgency.
- to italicize the text.
- is used to indicate emphasis and meaning.
- to underline text.
When teeth When is different from Because the former indicates the importance of the meaning, and the latter is a style that indicates how the word appears on the screen.
This is an important difference that will be explained in detail later.
Some believe that using HTML elements to highlight specific words on Google can directly affect how a web page ranks for those keywords.
But are they right?
Evidence of text formatting as a ranking factor
Google’s Matt Cutts appears to show in a 2013 Google Search Central video that HTML text formatting is a ranking factor.
Or did he?
From an audience point of view, “From an SEO point of view, a tag and What’s the difference between tags?”
Cutts said he had answered this question in 2006 and didn’t think the answer had changed.
“At the time, whenever we checked, When were treated exactly the same in all respects: ranking and scoring, how they were indexed, etc.
Similarly, for italics When and they were treated exactly the same.
Using either doesn’t make a difference in Google’s ranking. “
A Google patent granted in 2014 also suggests that the ranking algorithm gives extra weight to bold/italic text.
“One existing document quality measurement technique calculates an Information Retrieval (IR) score, which is a measure of how relevant a document is to a search query.
IR scores can be weighted in various ways. For example, document title matches may be weighted more heavily than footer matches.
Similarly, Text matches that are in large font or are bold or italic may be weighted more than a normal text match. “
Of course, not all Google patents are used in algorithms.
[Discover:] Insights into other Google ranking factors
Evidence for Text Formatting as a Ranking Factor
In the previously referenced video, Cutts says that Google treats the two types of HTML elements the same from a ranking perspective.
As for whether they affect rankings at all, he won’t say. They may not be equally influential.
Google has neither confirmed nor denied that HTML formatting is a ranking factor.
Google provides advice on HTML and semantic tagging in the style guide in the Google developer documentation. Specifically, don’t use HTML elements for visual formatting.
“ Elements indicate emphasis, not italics. Do not use it to italicize something that is not meant to be emphasized.Instead, for deemphasized italic Please use
Elements are not bolded to indicate strong importance. To bold less important words, use the elements. “
this is, or It suggests that tags such as are important in understanding the page.
John Mueller answered a tweeted question specifically about the text in bold 2017but the response is somewhat vague and open to interpretation.
“In the end, you’ll probably get more out of bold text/usability for human users. Bots might like it, but they’re not going to buy anything.”
Since the early 2000s, many on-page elements have become less important.
But here’s what the logic tells us: If you want to rank for a term, it’s not enough to just use that word in your content and make it bold (or italic, or bold and italic) every time it’s used. Raise the ranking.
Müller, 2021confirmed that text formatting helps both users and bots see what they want to stand out on the page.
“This is inherently semantic HTML. It makes it easier (for bots and users) to recognize what they think should stand out on the page. Title help, heading help, highlighting within text (bold, bold ), tables of tabular data, lists as lists, etc.”
However, in the following tweet, he also confirmed that it doesn’t help with rankings.
“These things won’t skyrocket your site’s rankings, but the little things can help, especially when it comes to understanding your page better. Think of it as providing relative guidance within your page.” SEO Points “If I have 5, what should I use them for on this page?”
At the Google SEO Office Hours on the same day, Mueller discussed whether bolding paragraphs promotes SEO.
After watching Matt Cutts’ video from 2012, he explains that with semantic HTML you can give parts of your page more meaning with the right markup.
“So typically we try to understand what the content of a web page is and look at different things to figure out what is actually being emphasized. It is included, but it also includes anything that is actually bolded or emphasized within the text on the page.
So, to some extent, there’s a little extra value there, in that it’s a clear sign that you actually think this page or this paragraph is about this topic.
And usually that’s consistent with what we think the page is about. So it doesn’t change much. Another thing is that this is mostly relevant within web pages.
So if you just say “Bold the whole page, Google knows my page is the most important page. By making everything bold, you basically can’t make it bold. Everything because they are the same.”
On the other hand, if you take a handful of sentences or words across the page that say this is very important to me and bold them, it’s a lot easier for us to say. This could be one of the most important points on this page.And we can give it a little more value
And essentially that sort of thing is anything related to semantic HTML that gives a page a little more meaning by using appropriate markup for it. And from our point of view, it’s a good thing. It helps me understand the page a little better.
So if you want a quick one-word answer, does bolding the key points in a paragraph help SEO? Yes, it does. It will help you better understand that paragraph or that page. “
Text Format as a Ranking Factor: Our Verdict
As you can see, text formatting can affect how search engines determine the most important content on your page.
However, the bolded content on your page is unlikely to be a factor that moves you higher than your competitors in search results.
Still, good markup helps users and search engines find the most important points in your content.
Learn more about text-level semantics and how to properly use these elements in the WHATWG Community HTML Living Standard resources from Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
