Is bolding keywords spammy?
-
It used to work for me on some sites - but maybe it's considered spammy these days?
Any feedback appreciated.
-
I think it might be possible to get penalty from bolding. I started to appear/disappear yesterday with my both main keywords on homepage. It kept doing that every few mins until today, disappeared and not any signals to come back. Both keywords was bolded in the first paragraph. Keyword density is ok.
My backlink anchors are fine and i don't think it is because of them. Still, made some moves and changed exact match keywords to my domain/url ones on some websites.
Homepage is still ranking for its other keywords, where is also those main keywords inlcuded as a long tail ones. So everything else seems to be good at the moment. I wonder if i manage to come back soon.. Any thought?
-
I occasionally use rather to highlight a phrase or a word, I don't think it has much influence on SEO, I would never simply bold keywords for SEO sake.. If it's really that important I'll make it a heading and give it a
****to
tags, which will factor much better.****
-
I beleive it is an easy factor for google to take into account when looking at a page for SEO over optimization so I don't do it because I think there is no benefit and it looks bad to the user in most cases.
-
I agree with Jackson on this one. If it makes sense and provides value to bold a keyword phrase, I see no reason why you shouldn't do it. I often bold phrases I want to drive home in the reader's mind.
But if it is really just to highlight keywords and for "SEO" then, yeah, it will probably look spammy.
-
I agree with Chris - it's definitely old school and can look a little spammy, especially if it is overused or calls attention to a somewhat unnatural use of a keyword.
That being said, I don't think bolding a keyword will incur a penalty from Google. If emphasizing the keyword provides some kind of value to a user, than you should definitely consider using it.
-
Good point Chris... I know, old school - refreshing my skills!
Going to remove the boldening, just needed to know if it could be causing a penalty or not.
thanks,!
-
It used to be considered a very, very minor factor and though I don't believe it is algorithmically spammy today, I do think it looks spammy and old school. My feeling is that people now get the impression they've been or are being marketed to when they land on a page that has the keyword emboldened.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How To Optimize A Page For Multiple Keywords
Hi Guys, In this video by Brian Dean he talks about how to go about optimising for multiple keywords. He basically said the main factors for optimising a page for multiple keywords are the following: Identify other keywords with same search intent as your primary keyword. Add them to title tag strategically, don't stuff them in there. Add as many of those keywords as h2 tags into the content, again when it makes sense. Are there any other more advanced ways you can use to optimize a page for multiple keywords with same search intent that could be good? Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts110 -
Home page ranks for most keywords with no SEO
Hi Guys, The keyword I am trying to rank is on seperate page with its own Optimization in place. However the HOME page of website starts ranking for that keywords . The keyword is mentioned on Home page Just once in content description, that's all. What should be my ideal strategy. Deleting the Sub Page, will that improve the SEO of my home page and improve the Rank for that keyword ? Also I can see my Own YELP pages rank better than the actual website for few terms . Any way around this ? A Part from building links to page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00071 -
Multiple keyword optimisation
What is the best way to optimise for multiple keywords for the same product? The situation basically is I have several products which I need to optimise currently only one page, the search terms that relate to the product are in some cases very different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
My website is ranking well on most of keywords. How do I find more keywords in order to drive more traffic to my website?
I have a website which is ranking well on some good keywords ie generic and long tail. It is also ranking for some really competitive keywords. and now getting constant traffic. I want to increase organic traffic to my website. What are the best possible ways to do this? How to research more keywords and how to identify that they will really work? Please help, I am confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rishi.ast0 -
Keyword Frequent On and Drop Off
Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me. I am currently doing SEO for a client’s site, over the past few weeks the keywords have gradually gone up steadily. One of the keywords however continues to jump on and off rankings. For a few days it will jump up to 23<sup>rd</sup> in Google Rankings, but then it will completely drop of the radar, not even in the top 200 anymore. I’ve gone through the site to check if there is anything wrong and stuck to guidelines offered here on SEO Moz but I’m stumped to figure it out. The Keyword has a page that helps target it, there is no stuffing, all I can think is if there are bad back-links coming in to us that Google that continues to push down the rankings. Can anyone help shed some light on the situation for me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kal-SEO0 -
Best practice to disavow spammy links
Hi Forum, I'm trying to quantify the logic for removing spammy links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
I've read the article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-check-which-links-can-harm-your-sites-rankings. Based on my pivot chart results, I see around 55% of my backlinks at zero pagerank. Q: Should I simply remove all zero page rank links or carry out an assessment based on the links (zero pagerank) DA / PA. If so what are sensible DA and/or PA metrics? Q: What other factors should be taken into consideration, such as anchor text etc.0 -
Using abbreviations in URL - Matching Keyword
We have a website that uses /us/, /ca/, /va/, etc for URLs of the different U.S. states. How much better is it (or is it at all better) to use /california/ or /virginia/ instead in our URLs to rank for searches that include the name of those states?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Heydarian0 -
How to Target Multiple Keywords in Single Page
Hey There, We're planning to target multiple keywords in a single page.. they keywords are definitely related and to an extent could be considered as synonyms.. We have a few questions as to how to optimize the page for on page and off page. On Page Do we mention all the targeted keywords on the page? At a maximum we could mention the keywords once..of course want to give out relevant and quality content and do not want to focus on keyword density How do we optimize the URL structure? For ex... We have keywords aa, ab and ac, where a is the base keyword Is it a good option to to have a URL structure like http://www.example.com/a-b-c.html? How do we go about mentioning the targeted keywords in meta description.. We've read the articles at SEOMoz.. but would want opinions What about HI, H2 and H3 Tags? how do we go about optimizing these Off Page While using off page we will of course vary our anchor text with the multiple keywords... this will make it look natural. Will we manage to rank for the multiple keywords (if we vary anchor text) that we're targeting if our backlinking method are strong? Thank you all for your inputs and responses...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elagaan0