Multiple H1 tags are OK according to developer. I have my doubts. Please advise...
-
Hi,
My very well known and widely respected developer is using multiple H1 tags I see - they like using them in their code and they argue multiple H1s conform with HTML5 standards. They are resisting a recode to one H1 tag per page.
However, I know this is clearly an issue in Bing, so I don't want to risk it with Google. Any thoughts on whether it's best to avoid multiple H1 tags in Google (any evidence and reasoning would be great - I can then put that to my developer...)
Many thanks for your help, Luke
-
I understand. Good reminder.
-
Hi AWC - this is tangential to the topic, but important for Q+A and Moz community participation in general.
Please, in the future, work to be as generous and empathetic in replies as possible. This community is meant to be a haven from many of the nastier corners of the web and while your comment was not excessively insulting, it wasn't kind either. Contributions both big and small are welcome here, as are opinions.
If we're going to maintain the amazing community here, we have to be mindful about the impacts of negativity. Thanks for understanding.
-
I think Ryan's point about HTML5 is good to keep in mind, but the problem is that we don't have any great guidance on what Google thinks about HTML5 right now, at least at this level of detail. They're waiting for the standard to evolve into common practice, just like the rest of us. I suspect, though, that if HTML5 is changing the rules, they may scale back their judgment.
-
To be fair, how do you know that they're "spammy", "abusive", or "irrelevant"? I've seen people just use them badly - for example, for CSS styling. Is it a best practice? No. Would I do it? No. Will it have major SEO implications in 2012? Probably not.
I've seen instances where an H1 was used badly, but not in a deliberately spammy or even irrelevant way. Developers often treat tags as much more interchangeable than they should.
-
Nobody said it would tank a site nor was it asked if it would tank a site. Until the H1 goes by way of meta keywords, the use of it will have some relevance and in my opinion should be used properly.
Of 200 plus algorithm elements, there are undoubtedly plenty of others that are "not a big deal" but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use them correctly.
Whew, there sure has been a lot of time spent on something that's "not a big deal."
-
No, Google just beat the value out of the H1 to the point its on life support..
I agree. That's why having 18 of them on one of your pages probably isn't going to tank your site.
I am not advocating more than one H1 tag... just sayin' that I don't think that this is a big deal.
-
I agree. I've been in touch about the developer's work now. It's simply not good practice, yet. I've heard that Bing is more definite in its advice on H1 than Google.
-
No, Google just beat the value out of the H1 to the point its on life support.
Sorry Egol, but if the innocents had no regard for SEO they wouldn't be putting a tag on it.
-
Keep in mind that some people innocently use
tags for formatting text. These folks are building websites because they have a message to share without any regard to SEO. And some of these websites pull an enormous amount of traffic because they are built by content area experts who write with enthusiasm and verve.
I don't think that google is pulling out a stick to beat these people.
-
Hi Luke,
As you can tell, it touched a nerve. I was looking for the moz link to a thread regarding this same issue and Alan (one of the Gurus) said multiple H1's can affect engines differently and if I remember correctly he made reference to a negative response from Bing.
Until H1's achieve the lofty status of meta keywords, I will continue to treat them with some importance and approach them with best practice.
I'll listen for the rumbling coming from your direction.
Good luck.
-
Thanks for feedback AWCthreads - tis a good question - ho hum - he's just not using them right. I've had this problem with people putting in hidden tags too. They're just not taking Google, etc., into account. Almost screamed as I counted through them yesterday hee hee.
-
Thanks Jennifer. Yup, doing all that too. I'm paying him on contract and part of the prob is if he's using H1s so much it could end up in a lot of expensive re-programming. I'm gonna stamp my feet I think. I often wonder whether anyone's tested the impact of such heavy use of H1s. We need an SEO Moz testing lab ;-).
Thanks for your input too AWCthreads Some good points there...
-
Hi Jennifer, If you're going to weigh in, you've got to bring more substance than a regurgitation of Rand's posts on the value of H1 and how SEO time is best spent. When my staff runs an SEOmoz on page optimization report and gets flagged for having 2 H1's on the page (which happened several times today), I didn't say, "Worrying about the H1's on the page is not that big of a deal." Nor did I say, "Make sure the site is crawlable and all those other high priority things." I described a bit of history of the H1, its purpose and best practice considering its value in optimization which is to say 1 is best, 2 is acceptable and more than 2 is not necessary nor is is best practice. I also added that if it wasn't of some importance, Rand certainly wouldn't have it as an element in his research tools. Having 18 H1's on a page doesn't seem excessive. It is what it is, which is asinine. That rumbling coming from down the hall is not thunder from above, but me having a visit with a developer and anyone else who thinks 18 H1's is acceptable or seemingly excessive.
-
18 H1s definitely seems excessive, however in the grand scheme of things this would be a much lesser priority in my book than many other things. I mean if this is the biggest problem, then you're doing quite well. If you're wondering if the developer is doing the right things overall, that might be a different question. I just don't think that worrying about the H1s on the page is that big of a deal. I'd make sure the site is crawlable and all those other high priority things before I spent too much time on this.
-
I was doing real well until I read this: "Ive noticed the developer's used about 18 per page" Multiple H1's are one thing, but excessive, spammy, abusive, irrelevant H1's are another.
Why in the world is he even bothering with an H1 tag if he's got 18 of them? Ask him, "What are you telling the bots with your H1's - 18 different things or the same thing 18 different times?" No wonder the value of the tag has declined so much since its inception. That volume of H1's is what Cutt's is referring to in his 2009 video.
Our CMS site auto-generates a header H1 tag when enabling optimization for mCommerce. So, when I put an H1 on the page for categories and products, the page has multiple H1's. I'd like to have one but will live with 2.
-
That definitely sounds like too many H1 tags.
On my pages I have two: one for the site name and the second for the page title. The site name H1 is in my
<header>section, while the other is in mysection. I wouldn't advice using more than 1 per section.</header>
-
Thanks David, Ryan, EGOL, Nakul - really useful feedback
I think I'm erring on the side of caution really, quite simply because any risk is too much risk. I'll read up on HTML5 some more Ryan as it sounds like it's changing thing a great deal. I've noticed the developer's used about 18 per page, for all headings. which seems quite strange, and possibly incorrect even in HTML5. I mean, blog posts headings to tweet headings to... just about every heading.
-
I would look at the pages and ask myself the question: Does this page really have more then 1 "Primary" heading ? Can you do 1 primary heading and then sub-headings ? If all such options are exhausted and the only way to address the structure and layout of the page is by having multiple H1 Tags...do it. But I would do it as a last resort or when it's absolutely necessary and it makes sense from a user perspective.
-
I have multiple H1 tags on some of my pages and don't see any problem. Just telling my observations.
If this is your site and you have concerns about multiple H1s.... maybe the developer needs to know that he is being paid by the hour and you are being paid on the basis of results. So if he wants any more hours he better not be messing with your results.
-
I had a conversation about this very topic recently, here is the advice I got:
Headings get totally different treatment in HTML5, we have to throw away everything we knew about this from HTML4/XHTML.
In earlier versions of HTML we only had headings (h1 - h6), there are no other sectioning elements at all. That is why we had to be very careful about our usage of the h1 tag, and there was always controversy regarding it usage.
In HTML5 the sectioning is much more powerful. We have a whole bunch of new elements for sectioning and the algorithm used to generate the outline is far more complex, and flexible. In short, it no longer matters how many h1 tags we have on a page.
We must still adhere to a structured approach and be careful to generate the right outline (one that reflects the proper structure of the document), and this is what this theme does.
To conclude and clarify, in HTML5 it doesn't matter if there is multiple h1 tags on a page, what matters is how they are used in conjunction with the other sectioning elements, and that the outline produced represents the correct structure of the document.
-
Best practices is to only use 1 h1 tag per page. You can see a video from mat cutts here mentioning you can have more if done correctly - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
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
-
Canonical tag On Each Page With Same Page URL - Its Harmful For SEO or Not?
Hi. I have an e-commerce project and they have canonical code in each and every page for it's own URL. (Canonical on Original Page No duplicate page) The url of my wesite is like this: "https://www.website.com/products/produt1"
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo
and the site is having canonical code like this: " This is occurring in each and every products as well as every pages of my website. Now, my question is that "is it harmful for the SEO?" Or "should I remove this tags from all pages?" Is that any benefit for using the canonical tag for the same URL (Original URL)?0 -
Canonical tags being direct to "page=all" pages for an Ecommerce website
I find it alarming that my client has canonical tags pointing to "page=all" product gallery pages. Some of these product gallery pages have over 100 products and I think this could effect load time, especially for mobile. I would like to get some insight from the community on this, thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JMSCC0 -
Small help with title tags
Hello all, this is my first question on Moz, i can see lots of people use it. Overall great community. I have a question, about title tags, ive done some keyword re-searches via Adwords-Keyword planner. And i need help combining the title tag for my pages. This are my most searched keywords:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | legendz
Main keyword - ACE Online Related keywords : Private Server Top 100 Download Gameplay Guide Now ive combined my title :
ACE Online Private Server - Top 100, Download, Gameplay, Guide Do you think this is good writen title or something its bad, i really cant deside. Please help0 -
How can do I report a multiple set of duplicated websites design to manipulate SERPs?
Ok, so within one of my client's sectors it has become clear that someone is trying to manipulate the SERPs by registering tons of domains that are all keyword targeted. All of the websites are simply duplications of one another and are merely setup to dominate the SERP listings - which, at the moment, it is beginning to do. None of the sites have any real authority (in some cases 1 PA and DA) and yet they're ranking above much more established websites. The only back links they have are from dodgy-looking forum ones. It's all a bit crazy and it shouldn't be happening. Anyway, all of the domains have been registered by the same person and within a two-month time period of each other. What do you guys think is the best step to take to report these particular websites to Google?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow robots
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. PSS: another reason why this needs looking at is because search engines won't be able to make an interpretation of these pages (until they have been cleaned up and fleshed out with unique content) which could result in bad ranking of the pages which could conclude to my users not being satisfied, so over and above the SEO factor, usability of the site is being looked at here as well, I don't want my users to land on these pages atm. If they navigate to it via the filters then awesome because they are defining what they are looking for with the filters. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Please help? unique penguin problem with a blogger template
**Can any one help? The problem: **There is a free blogger template on this site http://btemplates.com/2012/blogger-template-crystalweb/ that has a anchor text link to our site using the keyword "wholesale" in the footer, that is the main course of our site being hit with a penguin penalty.**The story so far:**On the 24th April our website dropped out of the serps for our main keywords, traffic has been down 90% ever since, we are a small family run business that relies on the inter-net and goggle for our site to work. Goggle organic serps is about 30% of our turnover and have already had no choice to let 3 people go, problem now is we are left with Me, my Dad and Mum, Both my Brothers and nephew and my wife and my brothers wife so unless we can turn this around I can see us going bankrupt.**What I have done so far:**After the 24th I have learnt a lot about S.E.O , and managed to remove 99% of all bad/spammy links and have now come to a dead end. I have been promoting what we do as a company and promoting our blog over the last 4 months and also built a great twitter/facebook following with lots of re-tweets and shares which we have made some good sales from. We have re-designed most parts of our website and managed to up the conversion rate by 300% We have worked on all aspects of our website to make sure we have little/no duplicate content , have worked on ways to speed up the site and fixed most dead links/404 problems.<var id="yiv904548185yui-ie-cursor"></var>**Now onto our main problem:**After a few weeks of removing links I found a blogger page that kept coming up with the same link, after some detective work I found the template was originally designed by http://www.deluxetemplates.com/ after a few emails we found out that someone paid deluxetemplates to add the link to the site, I'm guessing it was a S.E.O. company we used for 2 years, but they did not admit to this and could not help. A guy called Klodian from deluxtemplates was really helpful and helped remove from his site, also he agreed to a cost of $250 to remove all the pictures on his server to force the blogger's to update, this is what the template from deluxtemplates now looks like vozconuncion.blogspot.co.uk .Now this was only helping fix this issue a small bit as a different site called btemplates also used the template and added it to there website as a free download and hosted the template pictures on there servers. I have emailed a few times, I have sent them twitter messages and also added messages to lots of there templates on there site in the hope they can help, I have also contacted the owner directly on his goggle+1 page but no reply. This template is being downloaded once or twice a day, with no way to get hold of the blogger's using it. As a last resort I offered the owner $1000 to help me remove the template but still no luck.Does anyone have any ideas how to resolve? we are willing to pay to resolve this and will do what ever needs to be done.Thank-you for taking the time to read.Karl.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
Geotag city different from postal address. Can I mention both cities together in title tags?
This boundary thing seems to be haunting me at the mo. Oh what I'd give for somewhere within a defined boundary! Anyway, just noticed a client has one city in its official postal address, and another city under its geotag. So I'm looking at the title tags and I'm thinking of mentioning both cities on the main entry pages (6 of them) then dividing mention in sub pages. Is this acceptable to Google? Might they see mention of both cities in homepage title tag (and other entry pages) as spammy. I don't want to upset Google!!! PS. Both cities are core markets. I would say they're of equal importance in terms of current business bookings and business potential.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Farmer Update Case Study. Please question my logic here. (Very long!)
Hi SEOmoz community! I would like to try to give a small (well...) case study of a Farmer victim and some logical conclusions of mine that you are more then welcome to shred to pieces. So, I run MANY sites ranging from low to super quality and actually have a few that have been hit by farmer but this particular site had me scratching my head as to why it was torched. Quick background: Sitei s in a very competetive niche, been around since 2004 initially as a forum site but from 2005 also a content driven site. Site is an affiliate site and has been ranking top 5 for many high-value commercial KW's and has a big long-tail of informational kw's. Limk profile is a mix between natural, good links and purchased links from various qualilty sources. Content is high quality written articles, how-to's, blog posts etc. by in-house pro writers plus UGC from a semi active forum (20-30 posts a day). Farmer: After Farmer, this site's vertical is pretty much same as before with the biggest exception being my site. I quickly discounted low-quality content (spider-food) and focused instead on technical reasons. I took this approach since this site isn't the most well kept site I have and I figured the crappy CMS + PHPBB might have caused isseus. I didn't want to waste my time crawling the site myself so I quickly downloaded all the URLs that Majestic had crawled. Too my surprise the result of Majestic's crawler was over 3 million URLs when the real number would likley be 30-40k and Google has about 20k indexed. After scanning through the file with URLs I knew I had issues. Massive amounts of auto-generated dupe pages from the forum and so on. By adding around 20 new lines to robots.txt I was able to block millions of pages from being crawled again. My logic: Ok, so now I think I've found what caused the drop. Milllions of dupe pages and empty pages could have tripped the Farmer algo update to think the site is low quality or dupe or just trying to feed the spiders with uselessness. My WEAK point in this logic is that I can't prove that Google even knew about (or smart enough to ignore them). Google WMT tells me they've crawled an average of around 10k pages the last 90 days. Given this I'm doubting my logic and if I've found the issue or not. My next step is to see if this gets resolved algorithmically or not, if not i feel I have a legitimate case to submit a reinclusion request but i'm not sure? Since I haven't been a contributing member to this community I'm not looking to get direct help with my site, but hopefully this could spark some discussion about Farmer and maybe some flaming of my logic regarding the update 🙂 So, would any of you have drawn similar conclusions as I did? (Sweet blog bro!)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | YesBaby0