What is the difference between <s> and <del> in HTML, and do they affect website rankings?

html tags seo
octref picture octref · May 24, 2013 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

What is the difference between <s> and <del>? I have read here that there are semantic differences between <b> and <strong>, does this apply to <s> and <del>? Additionally, how are such semantic differences, if any, interpreted by search engines and what affect would they have on rankings? Are there any other tags that affect search rankings?

Answer

Explosion Pills picture Explosion Pills · May 24, 2013

<s> and <del> both still exist in the HTML specification.

  • The <del> element represents a removal from the document.
  • The <s> represents contents that are no longer accurate or no longer relevant.

That is to say that they actually represent different things semantically. Specifically <del> would be used if you had an existing document and wanted to indicate text that was in the document, but has been removed. This would be different than text in a document that is no longer accurate, but that has not been removed (you could use <s> for that).

You should not use or depend on either for styling even though most browsers do have them strike-through by default. You should only rely on CSS for presentation.

Due to the mercurial nature of how search engines work, it's very difficult to say whether one tag or another will make a difference on how keywords are created and your content is indexed. You should focus on creating good content that is semantically correct, and your website rank will follow.

Related questions

How to get current formatted date dd/mm/yyyy in Javascript and append it to an input

I would like to add a current date to a hidden HTML tag so that it can be sent to the server: <input type="hidden" id="DATE" name="DATE" value="WOULD_LIKE_TO_ADD_DATE_HERE"> How can …

Read More
Adding attribute in jQuery

How can I add an attribute into specific HTML tags in jQuery? For example, like this simple HTML: <input id="someid" /> Then adding an attribute disabled="true" like this: <input id="someid" disabled="true" />

Read More
HTML tag <a> want to add both href and onclick working

I'd like to ask about HTML tag <a href="www.mysite.com" onClick="javascript.function();">Item</a> How to make this a tag working with href and onClick? (prefer onClick running first then href)

Read More