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
-
Google suddenly stops ranking a page for a "keyword" with same "keyword" in title tag. Low competition.
Hi all, We have released our next version of product called like "software 11", which have thousands of searches every month. So we have just added this same keyword "software 11" as page title suffix to one of the top ranking pages. Obviously this is the page has been added suddenly with "software 11" at page title, multiple header tags and 1 mention in paragraph. Google ranked it for 2 days and suddenly stopped showing this page in entire results for the same keyword we optimised the page for. Why does it happened? Does Google think that we are overdoing with this page and ignoring it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
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 -
I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
Hi Guys QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ. 1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content. Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to **ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat ** If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well? How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make? Any insight into this would be great! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Repetition in Title Tag and Description
Let's say this is a hypothetical title: "Chevrolet Parts in Buffalo, NY | Novotny Chevrolet" Would having two instances of Chevrolet between the name of the store and the keyword set off a spam warning or at least be a bad SEO practice? Also, would it be smarter to phrase it, "Novotny Chevrolet Parts in Buffalo, NY" or something of the sort? Would this principal also apply to meta descriptions? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Hidden H1 Tags
I am trying to triple check this - I have a client who has all of their H1 tags as hidden. As far as I am concerned, anything hidden is not a good thing for SEO. I am debating with their online store provider that this is not good practice. Everything I am reading says it is not good practice. They are saying it is for "My SEO experience would suggest otherwise. In addition, the H1 adds semantic value for users with disabilities to help give them context with what the content of the page is." Did I miss something? They are a large brand and have not been penalized. This has been happening for 8 months.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smulto0 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Product Review Permissions
Hello, In the past, a client has gotten a lot of emails from customers saying that they like specific products. Now he needs reviews. Can we use those old emails, with no name or maybe with initials as product reviews? We don't want to do anything unethical.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Hidden Text in Style Sheet
I have read Eric Enge's Comprehensive Guide To Hidden Text but I'm no coder so I would appreciate some clarification. Am I assuming correctly that the following is hidden text coded within a style sheet: here I am! Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bragg0