CSS question
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- TheBlueOne
Had a friend and former intern of mine just send me a CSS question, which I answered, but not sure of my response, so I figure I'd throw it out to the peanut gallery:
If you're forced to use an inline style tag on a list item, does it matter for SEO purposes if you use the BOLD or STRONG tag? She was getting hounded by a CSS nazi at her place of employment for using bold, the reason being that it would interfere with SEO.
After criticizing the fact that she shouldn't be using inline styles if she could help it and that she should do a li class and style it in the stylesheet - (she responded that she had no choice), I said I don't see how either would effect SEO, although I'd go with the STRONG bc BOLD is the depreciated method.
What say you, peanuts...
- ********0
she doesn't know how to
- i meant she doesn't know what she is talking about********
- i meant she doesn't know what she is talking about
- ninjasavant0
bold is depreciated so your advice is correct. You are also correct that stylesheets have no impact on SEO, inline or otherwise.
- *buys ninjasavant a beerTheBlueOne
- I'll be in JFK Terminal 5 on April 1 and 6 :Pninjasavant
- 7point340
i think there is probably articles on this, but realistically she should just make the font-weight part of the inline style if she's doing it that way.
doubt it interferes with SEO. what would a search engine care whether a piece of text is bold or not?
- ********0
Nothing wrong with strong as far as I'm aware.
I use it if it's a one-off. Less code than whole new style sheet entry.
- 7point340
i think the main reason for using strong tags is for screen readers. not sure if it holds any other advantage over b
- mikotondria30
I'm a bit of a luddite in that unless a style/element is repeated, do jut bash out the inline without thinking. Anytime that a defining the styling in a class etc would save me time and be more efficient, I do that, otherwise inline everytime.
- TheBlueOne0
Thanks guys.
- flashbender0
strong would be preferred because of the whole deprecated thing. My understanding is that if you are a fundamental zealot about it, an inline style would affect SEO because one (albeit very small) part of SEO is content vs code ratio.
- thoughtandtheory0
The <strong> tag works a lot like title tags, just to a lesser degree. So for instance, if you bold a word like "dog" and someone is searching for dog. Your page, if all other things are equal, would rank higher.
Now that being said, it's not exactly going to make a huge difference and there's much more important things you could be doing to rank higher.
- trooperbill0
no affect on seo... googles not bothered unless you use display:none in which case they take a second look.
- vaxorcist0
Strong is good... bold is not that bad though...
I'm glad people here know that markup doesn't affect SEO that much, too bad clueless corporate CSS nazi's like to view source and start blasting people, blaming their bad SEO on easily criticisable markup....
also note that markup issues like this often happen because templating architecture was designed before some random management change of direction, thus code duct tape happens....