In Google’s Office-hours Hangout recorded on 12 November 2021, Google’s John Mueller discussed whether putting important portions from a webpage’s content in bold can improve its SEO. He confirmed: yes, but only up to an extent. He said that it definitely adds a certain amount of extra value to the page but it also depends a lot on how the rest of the content is. For example, putting text in bold where the content runs thin isn’t going to help your cause much, as Google is generally able to figure out on its own what’s important on a page and what’s not. However, putting something in bold sends a clear and stronger signal to the crawlers that it is not to be missed.

Here’s what John said.

“So usually we do try to understand what the content is about on a web page, and we look at different things to try to figure out what is actually being emphasized here, and that includes things like headings on a page. But it also includes things like what is actually bolded or emphasized within the text on the page.

So to some extent that does have a little bit of extra value there, in that it’s a clear sign that actually you think this page or this paragraph is about this topic here. And usually that aligns with what we think the page is about anyway, so it doesn’t change that much.”

Bolded Text helps a page’s SEO cause. But rest of the content is equally important.

And it absolutely doesn’t help a page’s SEO cause when all of the content is put in bold. So one should refrain from that line of thinking that if everything is in bold, Google will evaluate it on the basis of it being the most important page, and eventually, will rank it better. That is not going to happen at all.

“The other thing is that this is, to a large extent, relative within the webpage. So if you go off and say, well I will just make my whole page bold and then Google will think my page is the most important one, then by making everything bold essentially nothing is bold because it’s all the same.

Whereas if you take a handful of sentences or words within your full page where you say this is really important for me and you bold those, then it’s a lot easier for us to say well here’s a lot of text, and this is potentially one of the most important points of this page, and we can give that a little bit more value.

And essentially what that kind of goes into is everything around semantic HTML where you’re giving a little bit more meaning to a page by using the proper markup for the page. And from our point of view that’s good. It helps us to understand the page a little bit better.

So if you want to kind of like simplify it to one word answer, does bolding important points on a paragraph help the SEO, yes it does. It does help us to better understand that paragraph or that page.” concluded John.

Do watch John Mueller’s full response to question at the 40:23 minute mark and may be also stick around for the rest of the discussion for some other valuable insights.

Source: Search Engine Journal