Hidden H1 tag - ?permissable
-
Until now I have been building websites either from scratch or with a template. Recently I decided to learn Adobe Dreamweaver.
At the end of the first "Building a Website using Dreamweaver" lesson, the author notes the site is done but an H1 tag is missing. The instructor advises "The page doesn't have a top-level heading (
). The design uses the banner image instead. This looks fine in a browser, but search engines and screen readers expect pages to be organized with a proper hierarchy of headings:
at the top of the page, ..."
The instructor then walks readers step-by-step into creating an H1 tag and using absolute positioning of -500px top to cause the tag to not be visible.
My initial thought was the instructor was completely wrong for offering this advise, and users would be banned from search engines for following these instructions. I had planned to contact the writer and suggest the instructions be modified. Prior to doing such, I wanted to request a bit of feedback.
The banner image's text in this example is "Check Magazine: Fashion and Lifestyle". The H1 tag that is created and positioned off-screen uses that exact same text.
In an old blog comment, Matt Cutts shared "If you’re straight-out using CSS to hide text, don’t be surprised if that is called spam. I’m not saying that mouseovers or DHTML text or have-a-logo-but-also-have-text is spam; I answered that last one at a conference when I said “imagine how it would look to a visitor, a competitor, or someone checking out a spam report. If you show your company’s name and it’s Expo Markers instead of an Expo Markers logo, you should be fine. If the text you decide to show is ‘Expo Markers cheap online discount buy online Expo Markers sale …’ then I would be more cautious, because that can look bad.”"
I would like to get some mozzer feedback on this topic. Do you view this technique as white hat? black hat? or grey hat?
-
Definitely not hide any heading tags!
But what about advanced development techniques like tooltips and lightboxes? If you want to display a part of the page only on a certain user interaction?
Would this impact your OnPage optimization negitively when the spider sees an html tag with a css property of hidden?
-
I would not hide the H1 on any of my sites.
-
Personally I've always avoided hiding page objects, seems to be a little fruitless to put work into implementing an object on a page only not to show it.
If the graphic is simply text and the aim of the graphic is to provide a good looking heading theres no reason not to use Google fonts (or similar) or Cufon HTML5 tags.
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
-
Script must not be placed outside HTML tag? If not, how Google treats the page?
Hi, We have recently received the "deceptive content" warning from Google about some of our website pages. We couldn't able to find the exact reason behind this. However, we placed some script outside the HTML tag in some pages (Not in the same pages with the above warning). We wonder whether this caused an issue to Google to flag our pages. Please help. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Does Google and Other Search Engine crawl meta tags if we call it using react .js ?
We have a site which is having only one url and all other pages are its components. not different pages. Whichever pages we click it will open show that with react .js . Meta title and meta description also will change accordingly. Will it be good or bad for SEO for using this "react .js" ? Website: http://www.mantistechnologies.com/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA0 -
White H1 Tag Hurting SEO?
Hi, We're having an issue with a client not wanting the H1 tag to display on their site and using an image of their logo instead. We made the H1 tag white (did not deliberately hide with CSS) and i just read an article where this is considered black hat SEO. https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/16-faqs-of-seo The only reason we want to hide it is because it looks redundant appearing there along with the brand name logo. Does anyone have any suggestions? Would putting the brand logo image inside of an H1 tag be ok? Thanks for the help
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
How does Google handle product detail page links hiden in a <noscript>tag?</noscript>
Hello, During my research of our website I uncovered that our visible links to our product detail pages (PDP) from grid/list view category-nav/search pages are <nofollowed>and being sent through a click tracking redirect with the (PDP) appended as a URL query string. But included with each PDP link is a <noscript>tag containing the actual PDP link. When I confronted our 3rd party e-commerce category-nav/search provider about this approach here is the response I recieved:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The purpose of these links is to firstly allow us to reliably log the click and then secondly redirect the visitor to the target PDP.<br /> In addition to the visible links there is also an "invisible link" inside the no script tag. The noscript tag prevents showing of the a tag by normal browsers but is found and executed by bots during crawling of the page.<br /> Here a link to a blog post where an SEO proved this year that the noscript tag is not ignored by bots: <a href="http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/" target="_blank">http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/<br /> </a> <br /> So the visible links are not obfuscating the PDP URL they have it encoded as it otherwise cannot be passed along as a URL query string. The plain PDP URL is part of the noscript tag ensuring discover-ability of PDPs by bots.</p> <p>Does anyone have anything in addition to this one blog post, to substantiate the claim that hiding our links in a <noscript> tag are in fact within the SEO Best Practice standards set by Google, Bing, etc...? </p> <p>Do you think that this method skirts the fine line of grey hat tactics? Will google/bing eventually penalize us for this?</p> <p>Does anyone have a better suggestion on how our 3rd party provider could track those clicks without using a URL redirect & hiding the actual PDP link?</p> <p>All insights are welcome...Thanks!</p> <p>Jordan K.</p></noscript></nofollowed>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eImprovement-SEO0 -
Pointless Wordpress Tagging: Keep or unindex?
Simple as that. Pointless random tags that are serving no purpose other than adding apparent bulk to a website. They are just showing duplicate content and literally are random keywords that serve almost no purpose. And the tags, for the most part are only used on one page. If I remove them however, they will probably drop our site from around 650 pages to 450 (assuming I keep any tags that were used more than once). I have read through some of the other posts on here and I know that Google will do some work as far as duplicate content is concerned. Now as far as UX is concerned, all these tags are worthless. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Why isn't Moz recognizing meta description tags using SLIM?
Hey All, I keep getting reports from Moz that many of my pages are missing meta description tags. We use SLIM for our website, and I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same issue getting Moz to recognize that the meta descriptions exist. We have a default layout that we incorporate into every page on our site. In the head of that layout, we've included our meta description parameters: meta description ='#{current_page.data.description}' Then each page has its own description, which is recognized by the source code http://fast.customer.io/s/viewsourcelocalhost4567_20140519_154013_20140519_154149.png Any ideas why Moz still isn't recognizing that we have meta descriptions? -Nora, Customer.io
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sudonim0 -
Would reviews being served to a search engine user agent through a noscript tag (but not shown for other user types) be considered cloaking?
This one is tough, and I've asked it once here, http://www.quora.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO/Is-having-rich-snippets-placed-below-a-review-that-is-pulled-via-javascript-considered-bad-grey-hat-SEO, but I feel that the response was sided with the company. As an SEO or digital marketer, it seems that if we are pulling in our reviews via iframe for our users, but serving them through a nonscript tag when the user agent is a search engine, that this could be considered cloaking. I understand that the "intent" may be to show the same thing to the bots as the user sees, but if you look at the view source, you'll never see the reviews, because it would only be delivered to the search engine bot. What do you think?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eTundra0 -
NoFollow tag for external links: Good or bad?
I have a few sites that have tens of thousands of links on them (most of them are sourcing images that happen to be external links). I know that it's a good thing to externally link to reputable sources, but is it smart to place the nofollow tag on ALL external links? I'm sure there is a good chance that external links from posts from years ago are pointing to sites that may now be penalized. I feel as though nofollowing all the external links could come off as unnatural. What are the pros and cons of placing the nofollow tag on ALL external links, and also if I leave it as is and don't put the nofollow tag on them. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0