Does google give any weight to words in bold in a blog?

[sunfunbill]

I know about using the H1 format to give a word more weight. I've got to change the size sometime of the damn H1 format so I can use it.

But I've also seen people make all the keywords bold. I assume that is just for seo reasons. Does that help at all? I would assume not, but would like any opinions on it. Could it help to make google see what you are trying to make as your main key word?

Thanks!

[balls_deep]

bold does play some part in the algo but im not sure how effective bolding words would be.

I bold parts of my post to make the article more readable, not really for SEO.

[nolimits4]

wow didnt know this

i need to research this google math more

[jonnydoe]

I don't think H1s really do shiat anymore and bolding doesn't either for me. I would say just bold it when it fits the design purpose...

[odysseus]

I think I've noticed some very small benefit from bolding keywords. If I remember to do it, I use CSS to make the bold look normal, so I don't have a bunch of bold keywords sticking out at the reader looking dumb. But, it's not such a benefit that I lose sleep over it if I forget to do it, or forget the CSS thing.

[Chang]

Yeah, I don't know how much weight they put on that any more. It seems like a way too simple thing to do to spam keywords with h1 tags, etc. that Googlebot probably doesn't give two shits about it.

(I still use them anyway )

[timelord]

Google will still see the bold text as nominally noteworthy and will afford it some weight.

But that weight is dependent upon where the bold words also reside contextually elsewhere in their relevancy measurements.

So if the bold words are also in your title tag, meta descriptions, Dir names, graphic names, domain name and is repeated liberally throughout the site/headings, then bolding will add more weight.

By itself it means bugger all, in context it means something.

[odysseus]

Originally posted by timelord
Google will still see the bold text as nominally noteworthy and will afford it some weight.

But that weight is dependent upon where the bold words also reside contextually elsewhere in their relevancy measurements.

So if the bold words are also in your title tag, meta descriptions, Dir names, graphic names, domain name and is repeated liberally throughout the site/headings, then bolding will add more weight.

By itself it means bugger all, in context it means something.

Very well put! What's up Timelord?

[timelord]

What's up Timelord?

Hey Odysseus, I'm good brother. I have work coming out my ears and it's shaping up to be a very profitable year in 2008.

Mostly though mate, I'm spending a lot of time with my 15 week old baby boy Felix.

[odysseus]

Very good to hear. Glad you're enjoying fatherhood, and not letting work get in the way of family time.