Changing H1 Tag based on referrer
-
Hello,
I need some quick help and advice. We're going through a website re-design, and we have a few H1 tags set on some of our inner pages. The team is ok with these, however they want to change the H1 tag if the user gets to that page from a page within the site.
Example:
When the referrer is our site (www.domain.com), the H1 tag = Go to Step 2When the referrer is anything else, the H1 tag = Welcome to our site
I'd like to keep the H1 tag as the SEO rich keyword text we agreed on (in this case "Welcome to Our Site"), however our developers don't think its directional enough and wants to change it based on the user path.
I'm ok with the suggestion, however I want to make sure that if we choose the option with the referrer that this doesn't impact our SEO efforts.
I'm assuming the referrer will changed based on how the bot gets to the page, but i'm not certain and was wondering if anyone had some thoughts on this..
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks...
-
Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon.
That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor. Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google.
I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.
-
Good question.. I'm not sure but inclined to say that googlebot wont accept sessions either. They used to have many problems with sessions and would index pages with session ids (don't see those anymore). Hopefully whatever they changed would help you too.
-
Hey,
Thank you..that helps..Welcome to our site isn't the keyword rich text i was referring to..lol..was just trying to keep it as general as possible...
Also, would this be the same if we used session instead?
-
I don't see how "Welcome to Our Site" is keyword rich but you can make the message changing cookie based instead. Since Googlebot doesn't accept cookies, it will always see "Welcome to Our Site".
Googlebot can't read cookie experiment - http://www.danclarkie.co.uk/googlebot-javascript-ajax-and-cookies-its-complicated.html
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
-
Website redesign- change of server . What to do with old site? Keep for a while or delete right away?
Hey Mozzers, Two days ago, we redesigned our website and changed the server at the same time to get faster loading times. Here is what we have done. The old site was hosted on ipage, new site with a new design hosted on UPCLOUD. We changed the A record to the new server, uploaded a new site, submitted a new sitemap to Google Search console, 301 redirected all old URLs to new ones, most have changed a bit. Old URLs were ending with " .html "the new ones do not have that at the end. Submitted AMP pages to Google as well. Now here is my question. Should we delete the old site completely from ipage or should we keep it for a while? Google has indexed the new URLs that were created with the redesign, these URLs did not exist on the old site. But it still shows most of the old URLs on SERPs (these are URLs that have been 301 redirected to a new equivalent page) I understand 2 days is not very long for Google to get everything right, but I am not sure what we should do with the old site? Keep it or get rid of it to help Google index the new one only. FYI every single old URL that appears on Google search when clicked on will take you to the right place, we made sure there are no 404s at all. As this is very important to our business and we get most of it from Google I want to make sure we do it right for SEO purposes. The agency that designed the site did not really know the answer to that question, as they do not have SEO specialists. Please help, any input you might have will be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | Davit19850 -
Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https
Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff. A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages. Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in: I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though... As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it? Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!) Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com Thank you!
Web Design | | MobileDay1 -
Wordpress Theme is blocking alt tags. Does anybody know of any special plugins?
We have a special wordpress theme for nataliecass.com. Unfortunately the theme is blocking all the alt tags (this is a photography website...alt tags are very important). Does anybody know of any special WP plugins for alt tags? Thanks
Web Design | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Wordpress Site Structure and H1 Tags
We are working on optimizing a client's website and asked the client's webmaster to change a handful of H1 tags. The webmaster said they could not do to the existing names being pre-set in the design. The website is built in Wordpress. The client has repeating H1 tags due to the 'design'. I have attached a snapshot of the backend. Is there a rule around Wordpress site structure where this doesn't happen? Is it worth changing? If so,what is the best solution. Thank you ahead of time. ylAMvNg.jpg
Web Design | | seoessentials0 -
Wordpress - redirecting tags
I just ran a webmaster tool from Yoast SEO premium and notice I have a lot of problems with tags (restricted-robots-txt) For example : http://www.soobumimphotography.com/tag/wedding-group-photo/ Do I have to redirect to http://www.soobumimphotography.com/wedding-group-photo/ Should I do this to each and every posts Thank you
Web Design | | soobumim0 -
What Are The Hazards to Changing Over to Responsive Web Design?
We have recently re-programmed our website to Responsive Web Design. All the URLs have remained the same, all the content is unchanged. We have this new version sitting on a development server and are finding ourselves hesitant to make the changeover. Our rankings are great currently, and our question is whether or not there are any risks that we will incur by making this change. We would appreciate any advice on how to implement this change safely. Or if that's it's even possible to insure that there won't be ranking losses.
Web Design | | gfiedel0 -
H1 image replacement question
Working with content folks on a new section of our website. Developed a new logo for this section of the site, and they want to incorporate the style of it into all of the page headings. The only way to pull this off is to use images for H1's. (Without getting into unnecessary detail, they have to be images - too precise to try text over background images.) I made everyone aware of the importance of H1 text for SEO purposes, but they really want these images. When I first attempted SEO back in 2003, I recall doing a site using CSS image replacement along these lines: Widget Page #example {
Web Design | | c2g
background: url(../images/example.gif) no-repeat;
text-indent: -5000px;
} That was nearly 10 years ago, and they definitely ranked for the H1s at the time which led me to believe it worked. Anyone know if this is considered an acceptable practice today? I read some other threads about enclosing the image in tags and relying on the ALT text, but that doesn't seem to be a good option.0 -
Wordpress SEO Change of Structure
Hi, I have a Wordpress SEO Question. I ran the SEOMOZ checker on my website and it discovered roughly 70 of my 250 blogs had a URL length problem. I have removed the year and month from the WP structure as I read elsewhere that it is not important. The blogs displayed as follows: domain.com/blog/2011/02/contents-of-the-blog and the new structure is: domain.com/blog/contents-of-the-blog I have resubmitted the new structure to Google Webmaster Tools XML and updating the on-page sitemap on my main site. My blog was cached on 25<sup>th</sup> October and seems to be caching every 7 days, my website cached on the 24th and I wonder if I should do any follow up work to ensure the content gets crawled properly. a) Individually 301 redirect the old URLs to the new. b) Individual Canonical links for each. c) Adding the old pages to the robots file and disallowing. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | tdsnet0