H1 tag in the footer?
-
Quick question:
I have been scouring SEOMoz.org along with webmaster forums looking for an answer, but we have a person who insists that the H1 tag be located in the Footer.
I feel that is is fundamentally wrong because it is not the intent of the H1 tag, and I do not believe it is a best practice.
That being said would we see what little value the H1 tag has disappear if we put it in the footer, would we be penalized, or am I being too vanilla by wanting to keep it in the Title position?
-
The question is why do it?
Some say that the H1 has little value, but thats not the case, goolge will try to find a heading and i believe SEOMoz test show that using a H1 had lttle benifit over other ways of presenting a header, but all the same a header you should have and the best header is the H1.
Bing on the over hand dose value the H1 tag and sees no H1 tag as a violation. Bing says the H1 is almost as important as the Title tag.
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-h1-tag-is-missing
It also stats that muliplue use may lead to no indexing, I would not mess with it, expecialy if there is no reason to do so.
http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-h1-tags
-
Sorry! That question was a little funny. I have never heard of the H1 tag in the footer. H stands for Header. Hey, if your guy is persistent, tell him that we would like to see a high ranking website with an H1 in the footer. NOT a good idea.
-
When I was hired on at my company the site had been built with Absolute Positioned Div Layers... that said there were H1 tags at the bottom of the page.. Dreamweaver isn't very friendly about where it puts these types of layers. The site still did fairly well in the ranking despite this..
That said, I wouldn't personally put a H1 tag in the footer, I would want it as close to the body tag as possible. Though given the way AP Div's work you could have a H1 tag next to the body tag and still be in the footer.
-
Relevant or not, its the first time I've heard of putting an H1 tag in the footer. Perhaps calling it an F1 tag would be more appropriate. Seriously, some would argue the H1 tag has little to no relevance (Rand would probably fall into this category) and therefore some do not use it at all. Todd Malicoat would suggest the H1 tag has some relevance and is a good practice for page structure and keyword instance.
A recent thread among these posts and one I ascribe to is that failing to use an H1 tag is probably not going to hurt you, but using one is certainly not going to hurt you. If it is going to be of benefit to the user in terms of readability and navigation (with an arguable smidgeon of G benefit) go ahead and use it.
That being said, strong keyword copy in the lower block level is good block level distribution. Putting an H1 tag would be irrelevant in my opinion and unorthodox as H1 tags historically have been in the top block.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article. I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that. Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive. I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com0 -
How does the footer links impact the the pages SEO quality?
Hi, i want to ask a question. Does this kind of internal links will affect the SEO post quality? Please open the attachment (image) KskOg3U
On-Page Optimization | | joshuaong0 -
Should blog tags be location specific?
I understand the concept of organizing blogs with categories, but how specific should the tags on blog posts be? i.e. "cosmetic dentist" vs. "cosmetic dentist san francisco" I'm specifically using Squarespace if that helps. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ReaderSam0 -
SVG image files causing multiple title tags on page - SEO issue?
Does anyone have any experience with SVG image files and on-page SEO? A client is using them and it seems they use the title tag in the same way a regular image (JPG/PNG) would use an image ALT tag. I'm concerned that search engines will see the multiple title tags on the page and that this will cause SEO issues. Regular crawlers like Moz flag it as a second title tag, however it's outside the header and in a SVG wrap so the crawlers really should understand that this is a SVG title rather than a second page title. But is this the case? If anyone has experience with this, I'd love to hear about it.
On-Page Optimization | | mrdavidingram2 -
Is there anything wrong with having duplicate description tags if they are relevant to their pages?
I have duplicate description tags, but they make sense for the pages they're on. Is there anything wrong with this? Thanks for reading!
On-Page Optimization | | DA20130 -
Alt tag matching product titles - e-commerce
Hey all, Just wondering if it is ok to match the alt tag to product titles. Imagine an e-commerce site that lists a whole lot of products on any one page for any one category. Each product listing has a thumbnail image beside it. The easiest way to implement this dynamically is to use the product title for the alt tag. Anyone had any experience with this? Is it overkill / spam of keywords - given that the product title is repeated. Our current situation is that our alt tags are simply blank or say 'photo' which is no good, and we have hundreds of thousands of pages. Cheers, Croozie
On-Page Optimization | | sichristie0 -
Site wide internal links in footer
What is your take on site wide inernal links in the footer, e.g. for the most competitive keywords? Do you think those links are still useful or are those links of little value from your experience? It is an old school tactic but I still see many sites doing it.
On-Page Optimization | | Florakel0