Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I did a quick check, but couldn't find anything on Ebay that talked about how it improved results. Why not email them and ask for statistics or studies which support the benefit of paying for bolding on their site?

I've sold a bunch of items on eBay, and I vaguely remember that they had some sort of statistic that claimed more bids or higher bidding results with bolded items. I tried to recreate that experience... but couldn't find any specific numbers.

I'm curious about your question because I don't know of ANY search engine that enables you to make a search result boldfaced. I do know that you can pay to have your ranking higher, but that's indicated by shading or subheadings that indicate that the placement was funded, which I think makes it lose credibility.

I don't know of a specific hard study about boldface in search results. These may or may not be helpful depending on your mission, lol. If hard research is what you're after, I've done you no good.

At this link, they talk about the online readership of headlines and captions drawing the eye first... This may be an ancillary support for bold face.
https://www.poynterextra.org/et/i.htm

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen talks about reading habits on the web, and his studies of it, along with recommendations for using the data here:
https://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html

Both of the above are summarized here:
https://www.sitepoint.com/article/wondered-users-looked-first

Gerry McGovern talks about all this again here:
https://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2002/nt_2002_04_29_scan.htm

On the other hand, you might want to Google paid search sponsorship (adwords - type) for research on click through on paid ads, vs organic results. Apparantly the CTR on the paid keyword style is much higher than even the first position in natural search results. 1st position, in one thing I saw, gets exponentially more clicks than even 2nd position, but not near as much as the paid, or sponsored, keyword-hooked ads.

ROI is a different matter...

Search engines seek to provide relevant information to those who are searching. I dont know how bolding could increase relevancy of information. I think it would also increase on search engine spamming and therefore search engines may want to avoid it in their algorithim weighting.

But it of course increase visibility of a word, phrase or paragraph in a page or document but it is irritatating if a whole page is bolded.

Samuel