Can a page lose ranking because it has too many bold tags?

[raghavkapur]

I run a product search website for the Engineering Sector. Each of the companies listed on the website has a profile page. This page used to rank very well in google.

Over the last couple of weeks these pages disappeared for google i.e they fell about 20 to 30 spots in the search results for relevant keywords like the Manufacturer Name.

I was trying to analyze the page and found that Each of the Categories that the manufacturer supports was listed in "bold" and linked to the page for that category. A manufacturer can support up to 20 or 30 categories so this results in about 20 or 30 Bold keywords. Is this a bad practice? Could this be a reason for a drop in ranking or do bold keywords on a page not matter?

What are your views?

[TommyTan]

In regards to the bold tags, I don't recall reading anything about having too many bold tags will lower your ranking or affect your ranking.  However, having too many bold tags might cause bad user experiences though.

[TomRayner]

Can't say I would have thought this was the case myself, but I do suppose that it's slightly feasible.  Could be seen as over-optimisation - however, if that was the case and so it triggered a Penguin penalty, I think you would have seen a much bigger drop.

What I think has probably happened is that some links pointing to the domain or product pages might have been devalued by Google.  Recent blog posts and mentions by Google would suggest that there are a number of "link analysis" refreshes that go on weekly/monthly and so your site's backlinks may have been devalued as a result.

Of course, it's hard to say without doing a full audit, but I'd trump for something like that rather than too many bold tags.  Can't say it's a great idea having lots and lots of bold tags, mind.