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
-
Ecommerce store on subdomain - danger of keyword cannibalization?
Hi all, Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep). In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt). Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages. As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
How does Yoast SEO premium determine prominent keywords?
We are perplexed how Yoast determines which keywords to select on the page when ranking the top 5 prominent words in Insights. For example, we have a page where birthday parties is clearly the primary keyword. It is used an an H2, in body copy and tagged on images. Yet it does not show up at all. The term 20 Fiesta game points ranks #1. It is mentioned one time on the page in a bullet within one of 5-6 blocks. 40 Fiesta game points ranks 3rd and same situation. Waterpark ranks 4th and is mentioned twice on the page as a bullet of featured activities. But there ar 4-5 other attractions listed in the bullets higher? We have looked as tutorial videos and no one mentions how Yoast determines prominent keywords. Thanks in advance for steering us in the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Teamzig0 -
Greek SEO Menu Catecory Keywords with Lowercase or Hypercase? With tones or not?
Hello to all, Αs you know the Greek language is very special, wonderful but so difficult at the same time...! The same difficulty i face when im trying to use the adwords keyword planner tool, to choose the wright words for a new menu category when i built new SEO for a new site. I encounter a major problem with keywords who have the same meaning and some people use the right spelling and others use wrong spelling! I give you an example with word "κάρτα μνήμης" who means in english "sd card". In Greek language we have tones and we can wrote the word "κάρτα μνήμης" without a tones -> "καρτα μνημης" and without wright spelling and without tones at the same time -> "καρτα μνημησ". Keyword planner give me another results for each word whatever it has the same meaning! ex. (καρτα μνημης = 0 clicks, κάρτα μνήμησ = 210 clicks and καρτα μνημησ = 2400 clicks!!!) If i put the menu keywords with Hypercase you think that i am ok? I wonder if i use the wright spelling and orthography and i put them with Lowercase if I have a problem and didn't take the full of clicks of all keywords with the same meaning! I prefer for better design Lowercase's but if i have a problem with Seo i will change it! Thanks, Kalogeropoulos Marios
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marioskal0 -
Google News sitemap keywords
My company is a Theater news and reviews site. We're building a google news sitemap and Google suggests some recommended keywords we can use with their <keywords>tag: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/116037</keywords> Our writers also tag their stories with relevant keywords. What should we populate the <keywords>tag with?</keywords> We were thinking we'd automatically populate it with author-added tags, in addition to one or more of the recommended ones suggested by Google, such as Theater, Arts, and Culture (all of our articles are related to these topics). Finally, many of our articles are about say, celebrities. An author may tag an article with 'Bryan Cranston,' and when this is the case we're considering also tagging it with the 'Celebrities' tag. Are all or any of these worthwhile?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Optimized pages ranking lower than homepage with keywords
Ok, I know this question has been out there before, but i don't know how fo search for it specifically enough. I have several keywords that rank higher on my home page. As you know MOZ assigns keywords to whichever page on your site popping up in search first. So even though i have A-grade optimized pages for a particular keyword, that page may not pop up BEFORE the homepage for instance, on searches. In many cases, the homepage is grade "F" for a particular keyword, yet its pulling up first for most of my keywords. I know that my homepage has more rank because it gets the most visits and i'm sure we can't really optimize the homepage for EVERY keyword. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Do i just need to wait for my optimized page to catch up in rank, or is there a trick to optimizing homepage to ALL key words at grade "A" level? Do i need to keep back-linking to my optimized page directly to get the juice up? I created all these great optimized pages for specific keywords, but my homepage which shows "F" grade is the one pulling up 4th or 5th on searches Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DrMcCoy0 -
Keyword cannibalization
I ran the SEOMoz onpage diagnostic, and i got an alert for keyword cannibalization. My taxonomy is: www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/category (category page) www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword (supporting page) Links will be exact match in the primary navigation. www.mysite.com anchor text "category" => www.mysite.com/category www.mysite.com anchor text "category keyword" => www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword www.mysite.com/category anchor text "category keyword" => www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword and example would be /IT-support linking with anchor text "IT Support Servers" => /IT-Support/IT-Support-Servers I'm not going to have a cannibalization problem, am I?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Worth removing keywords...?
I was just going over a site I manage and noticed it had a load of meta keywords on it. Probably 10-15 keywords per page... Do you think this is harming the site? Is it worth removing them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
2 Year Old Keyword Focused Site Will Not Rank for Keyword
Hi All, I need your help. This site is confounding me. The site is turnstilefactory.com It's a few years old. Strong domain name and seo focused on the term 'turnstile'. In bound links are not abundant, but certainly not absent either. Considering the subject matter, content and competition in the space, I would expect this site by now to at least be in the top 10 pages for the search 'turnstile', but it's not. I've tried everything I can think of with this, but it just won't rank for anything other than it's domain name. Can anyone please take a look and let me know if they see something I'm missing? It would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomozpaul0