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
-
Alt tags
Do we use our main keyword only for alt tags for all images on the page?
On-Page Optimization | | Timberwink0 -
Title Tag issue
Hello, This is a weird one. I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction. A couple months ago, we updated trinitypower.com and it was back then that I first noticed this issue, but because the home page title tag was okay and contained the primary terms for that page, I told myself I would circle back. The problem is that even though Google crawls the site everyday, it does not update the title tag text in it's index. Google: "Trinity Power Rentals" and you will see the title in the index as "Trinity Power: Temporary Power Rentals". Go to trinitypower.com and view source. You will see the title tag in the code as "Temporary Power Rentals - Trinity Power" The desc tag has been updated correctly, but I can't figure out why not the Title tag. You can look at the cache version in the index of Google. It is showing the latest version of that tag, so I really do not understand what has happened here. I am using WP Super Cache... maybe a conflict with that? I have dumped it's cache numerous times though. Please let me know what you think. Thanks, Jarrett
On-Page Optimization | | TrinityPower0 -
Noindex or canonical tag for products which have no unique product description?
I have several ecommerce sites in the same niche and there are a high number of products shared among these sites. I understand that having unique product descriptions for each site may be ideal, but for several reasons this is not an option for the short term. Sales-wise it would be useful to continue products on several sites at the same time. Also it would not be a problem if only the product pages of our main store would show up in the google index. I thought about adding noindex xrobots tag to avoid that product pages are indexed in more than one store to avoid issues with duplicated or thin content or would you implement canonical tag here? What would you suggest?
On-Page Optimization | | lcourse0 -
Footer-links (navigation)
I want to put navigation links in my footer. I watched the (distilled) whiteboard friday video saying it can be a penalty. How are links in the footer different from links in the navigation. Why don't you get "hit" for putting the word "Real Estate Listings" in the navigation menu? It appears on every one of the 30k pages. I don't get why the links in the footer would have a negative effect if the links in the navigation don't. My example is a real estate website. When people are browsing properties (30k), it is convenient that at the end of the page there is a navigation of areas. I could put the navigation on the sidebar but that would be in essence, the same thing. A wordpress site would dynamically include that sidebar on every page.
On-Page Optimization | | JML11790 -
How to add canonical tag
Hi, I read through many of the forum questions dealing with the overly dynamic URLS and I think I understand. Please let me know if I know what I am talking about: If SEO moz is saying I have 20 pages (mostly search and home/index pages) with overly dynamic urls, I would go to the that particular page and add the following code between the head tag: This code would cause Google to go to this page instead of the following duplicate index pages: 1. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?pcsid=0a83aa7119cf3d80a1d018634ec4ec94&p 2. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?pcsid=18b220fc62628b013a51c6f26209df50&p There are a total of about 8 of these index pages. The problem is that I can't figure out where I would access each of these duplicate pages to add the canonical tag. There is only one home page with coding. As far as the search pages are concerned, I would not want Google to follow those pages would I? If that is the case, what would be the best code to add between the tags? For instance here are a couple of the overly-dynamic URL pages for the search pages: 1. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?p=catalog&mode=search&search_in=all&search_str= 2. http://www.about-sports-collectibles.com/index.php?pcsid=50354d5791e627dc2be6c86528154a5e&p=catalog&mode=search I hope I am not overwhelming anyone with my questions. I really am trying to get a handle on how Ll this stuff works. Thanks so much the help. Don
On-Page Optimization | | ge01734001 -
Are missing Meta Tags a big deal on a blog?
I show 272 missing Meta Description Tags after the crawl completed on my website. Pretty much all of those are from my website hosted wordpress blog. Should I be concerned about this?
On-Page Optimization | | webestate0 -
2 canonical tags on the same page
When using the 'on-page optimizer' tool, I continue to get the same recommendation on every page to only use 1 canonical tag on the page. I'm not sure why there are 2 tags on each page in the first place so I don't know how to remove the one that's not needed. Our site is on a WP blog and a sample page to view the source code would be: http://www.shilohstreet.com/blog/is-flipping-houses-smart-real-estate-investing.html Does anyone know why this is happening, how to fix it and/or if I should even be concerned with it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | shilohstreet0