Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hiding h1 tags in Magento
-
Hi Moz Community,
I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles.
The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines.
Thanks,
-Reed -
My view is a little bit different, but to be 100% I would have to look at the site. If the application / module is using style="display:none" to hide the tag, I would not use it. The reason being is that multiple h1 tags on a page dilute or in some peoples opinion cancel out other h1 tags. There are valid reasons to hide h1 tags, like when you are doing fade ins or have a slider with it in there. So I am of the opinion that even if it is hidden Google will pick up on it. So you do run the chance of being caught for keyword stuff or it could cancel out your h1 tag that is displaying. (As far as I know there is no clear 100% information on how Google handles multiple h1 tags. I have heard all sorts of things including it registers the first one seen in code, it registers the last one seen in code, it combines the weight given to all of the h1 tags, and even that they don't matter it is text size above the fold that matters)
If it were me this is what I would do. I would remove the text from the banners and use the built in functionality for the text. Depending on the location of them on the page really depends on how I would tag them, they could be h2, h3, span, ect. But I would opt for on page visible text over using a graphic with text. I realize that you do not like the style that it uses, but it is just a style that can usually be mimic'd with a style sheet. The reason I usually opt not to use text on banners is twofold. It cannot be translated and it cannot be searched.
-
Hi Jeff,
Exactly what I was looking for. I don't think we'd need to change the way titles are displayed, just wanted to be sure it wouldn't count it as duplicate or see it as a keyword hiding technique.
Thanks for your help
-
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for your response, really helpful.
Cheers.
-
Reed - You should be fine to use the "hide" function in Magento to not have the duplicate
tags show up on the site. If you want to jump into the code a bit more, you can likely change the way that the titles are displayed, but this might be a deeper dive into the design layer of Magento.
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff
-
h1 tags are useful, but are not needed by Google, as they will crawl the page to see the content. However if you have h2 h3 etc tags, but don't have an h1 then crawls will not read any tag at all, as they must be present, completed and sequential.
Hope that helps
Bruce
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
-
Should we set up redirects for all deleted TAGS?
We recently found our site had 65,000 tags (yes 65K). In an effort to consolidate these we've started deleting them. MOZ is now reporting a heap of 404 errors for tag pages. These tag pages should not have links to them so not sure how come they're being crawled. Any suggestions from experience in this area would be useful.
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Meta descriptions and h1 tags during a 301 redirect
My employer is shifting to a new domain and i am in the midst of doing URL mapping. I realize that many of the meta descriptions and H1 tags are different on the new pages - is this a problem ? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | ptapley0 -
Canonical Tag when using Ajax and PhantomJS
Hello, We have a site that is built using an AJAX application. We include the meta fragment tag in order to get a rendered page from PhantomJS. The URL that is rendered to google from PhantomJS then is www.oursite.com/?escaped_fragment= In the SERP google of course doesnt include the hashtag in the URL. So my question, with this setup, do i still need a canonical tag and if i do, would the canonical tag be the escaped fragment URL or the regular URL? Much Appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RevanaDigitalSEO0 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Alt and Title Attributes in Anchor Tags
Does it hurt to use alt and title attributes inside an anchor tag? Example: view my website article
Technical SEO | | donationtown0 -
Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident
Hi, 3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google. I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy". So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards? Thanks, Sven
Technical SEO | | Zitana0