You probably noticed that when you want to highlight a word in WordPress, it uses the Bold tag (<b>) as default. Since the Strong tag <strong> visually looks exactly the same, we decide to check if there are any real differences, SEO wise. Does Google have a preference between the two?
Note:
Original Title is "[Test #434] Which is Better, <Strong> or <Bold>?"
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
Test 434. This one is testing whether a <bold> or <strong> works. I did another test, the HTML test and testing the tags. I'm pretty sure I shared it before and these are not even beating the controls anymore. It used to be the strong one all the time and it was something that you wanted to have it beat all the controls but now these aren't even beating controls anymore so they're low level.
But in boryslav test you can see here that the strong beat out the bold and there's probably one or two reasons for it. 1) strong is now the W3C default for HTML. They're phasing out bold. Then, 2) before ~ the algorithm, strong is like strong emphasis. This is the focus word of this page. This is what the page is about.
So, when they looked at strong, bold and emphasis and together in that test it's strong one every time so they continue to use strong. However, if you see a testing tool saying you need 10, 15 bolds anymore so far all of our testing – even this one is pretty much indicating that's crap. Strong beat-up old bold. But, at the end of the day, it's not really all that big of a deal. If you don't want to have like 10, 15 strong ~ words on your page don't even mess with it.