: Do Search Engines Crawlers Read CSS? Making something bold makes it more important for search engine ranking and even improves readability for humans. To get the search engine ranking benefit,

@Lengel546

The generally accepted way to emphasise text is to use the <strong> tag. You can then style that using CSS.

Looking through our logs I can see some evidence that some spiders fetch CSS files. Specifically,


Googlebot-Image/1.0
DoCoMo/2.0 (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1)
Googlebot (http://www.google.com/bot.html)


Anecdotally there's evidence that some search engines use this to detect if text is being hidden (and therefore someone is trying to fool a search engine with bogus keywords).

I think your safest bet is to use <strong> and don't rely purely on CSS to emphasise important words or phrases.

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