John Mueller, Google Search Advocate, confirmed again that bolding text in a paragraph can help your website’s SEO as it allows Google to understand its content better.
This came up at the 40:23 mark during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout recorded on November 12, 2021, where Mueller said:
“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.”
John summed up his answer by saying that bolding words or paragraphs does help with SEO in short.
Here is Mueller’s full answer in the video below:
John also mentioned this Matt Cutts video from 2013 where this subject about bolded text was touched on once before.
“This is something that comes up every now and then. I double checked before the session, actually, and Matt Cutts did a video, I think, in like, 2012 or something around that about bolding and strong on pages.”
Cutts’ video had more to do with the use of “b tag” and “strong tag” and whether there’s a difference between them.
There’s no difference, but that is not what this subject is about.
As it relates to SEO, Mueller said bold text can enhance a page’s SEO.
Google crawlers, and in an effort to understand the content better, look for text that is either bolded or italicized.
Mueller also added that Google can usually figure out what’s important on its own, but bolded text makes the message more clear.
“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.”
According to Mueller, the significance of bolded text is relative and depends on the content on the page.
Stronger signals can be sent to Google by placing a few snippets of bold text throughout an article. But bolding every word on a page would add no value 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.”
Mueller concluded his answer by a simplified statement about the SEO value of bolded text by saying:
“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.”
Here are some John tweets he posted after this: