A Sneak Peek at a Piece of Google Ranking Algorithm

It may come as no surprise to some of you (myself included) but Google has basically confirmed that their code does provide more “weight” to terms that are bolded or italicized. For those of you who know how protective Google is about their “secret sauce,” you will no doubt share my excitement at this small-but-mighty revelation.

I was watching another Matt Cutts (Google employee) video today. He actually looked at the code in the ranking Algo on Google and says that STRONG and BOLD, are treated with exactly the same weight, as are EM and ITALICS. This was in response to a question he received asking whether Strong and Bold meant the same thing to Google.

OK, you probably already knew that but here is the unpolished gem…

By saying that, Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google’s algorithm DOES look at these tags. And why would they look for these tags if not to treat them differently? In other words, the strategy of bolding and italicizing certain words on a page is now given credence directly from Google, as we have been given a sort of peek into the code used by Google. This was, of course, already mentioned in section 2.3 of The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine but that written nearly a decade ago and just because something worked for Google back then, doesn’t mean it is part of their ranking algorithm today.

I doubt they are extremely important in the grand scheme of things, but every little bit helps. Besides that, bolding or italicizing your most important terms (within reason) is a great way to capture a visitor’s attention and move them towards conversion on your website.