As we were looking at bold vs strong, it only made sense to look at italics vs emphasis. As with bold and strong, while italics and emphasis produce the same looking result, they have different html definitions.
If Google follows the definitions , it seems logical that a page with keywords tagged as emphasis will outrank a page with keywords tagged as italic. We also put this to the test.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
The next obvious thing was – hey, if we’ve got bold and strong, what about emphasis and italic? It is the exact same thing. Italic is defined that text that goes to the right, it is just a font or physical movement of text. Empasis though, has a completely different description. It is the emphasized text. Same as with strong, it is not deprecated, it exists. This is emphasized text.
What is really interesting is that it has this extra description where they say to only use italic if you are just trying to get the text to shift to the right, use something else if there is a more appropriate semantic element so emphasize meaning that you are talking in a different voice or mood. There is a lot of definition going on here and our thought was, it worked for strong, it might work for emphasis.
Unfortunately, no. It wasn’t quite as good as the strong. We had the same set up here with the <i> and the <em> and emphasis won two and italics won 1, that is pretty good but then when we did just the two, it went the other way. Emphasis only won 1 and italic won two of those. It wasn’t quite like what we saw with bold and strong.
While I like this, I don’t quite like it as much as strong but on the other hand, it only takes three seconds to do. It is probably just as worth doing, I do not know if it is quite as fun as the other one, is my guess on it but it is also something that I am doing. I put it into play because it takes nothing to do and I rarely italicize or bold things.
We are talking about making one thing on a specific page, maybe for each those. I actually go by Cora, if Cora says we need some bolds, then that is what I do. If Cora says I need italics, that is when I do. But in this situation, if I need one italic phrase or bold phrase, I am doing emphasis and strong. It is not going to hurt you.