IE 9 & Strong Tags

[tomford]

Quick question, I've went through one of my sites and added quit a few <strong> tags to the page keywords. The text was already styled by CSS in one form or another and the appearance of the text didn't change.. which is exactly what I wanted.

The tag was simply for SEO purposes and not styling, that said, IE 9 doesn't adhere to that train of thought and decided they should emphasis an already otherwise styled element, thus resulting in a not so visually appealing webpage.

So my question is, how can I tell IE 9 to basically do nothing when it sees a <strong> tag?

I've tried

strong {
	font-weight:normal;
}

But that didn't seem to work. Any thoughts, suggestions or pointers is appreciated.

Thanks,
Tom

[hericles]

Quite a few <strong> tags should be avoided. Its hard to tell if overuse of any SEO element is really penalized but its best to be cautious. Interestingly, you want to emphasize the keywords for a bot but not for the actual reader. Strong around the keywords (one or two on the page) show me that what I searched for is on the page and where. Whats the point of getting high page rank if you're not actually making your page user friendly?

[tomford]

I appreciate the thought, as I said the elements were already styled using other CSS calls which are already visually appealing. The strong tag is used once or twice on pages to highlight the main keywords for SEO. Bots don't care if the style is BOLD HIGHLIGHT RED UNDERLINE, via CSS they do somewhat care about the <b> or <strong> tags. Which until IE9 hasn't been an issue.

[drjohn]

You've got some other problem in your code.
cos I've just tested your
strong {
font-weight:normal;
}
in IE9 and Firefox, and it works in both of them.

[tomford]

Really odd I didn't think of it before but the issue with font-weight:normal; was it was un-bolding or undoing previous styling, so in the end, I found that I needed to use the inherit tag so the text would retain the styling from previous css styling.

strong {
	font-weight: inherit;
}

So to summarize in case anybody else comes across the problem:
IE 9 will make <bolder> strong or <b> tags on text that has already been styled with another css call. Using font-weight:normal doesn't work because it actually undoes the previous styling.