Will Google hit me because I hide my H1 tag?
-
I read an article this morning regarding keywords on a web page. In the article it said that Google would hit anyone putting keywords on a web page but then hiding them from anyone visiting the website. This makes sense.
What it did make me think about though is the technique I use when building a website. If, for example, I'm building a website for "Acme Cheap Products". In the header of the page, I will have a H1 tag as well as an image tag for the company's logo.
As the logo has the company name on it, I would usually put the company name in a H1 tag as well, and then hide the H1 tag, so I wouldn't have a logo and then a title next to it saying the same thing as the logo.
The question is though, would this sort of technique trigger Google in to hitting my site?
-
**`# <a< span="">href="http://stackoverflow.com"> <img< span="">src="logo.png" alt="Stack Overflow" title="Click to return to Stack Overflow homepage" /></img<></a<>`**
-
Thank you for that Adam
-
Hi Al,
Using hidden text is considered black hat and has been identified as spam by most of the major search engines.
Best practice is to use the alt tag for images. There is no need to have a hidden h1 tag and this could even harm your site if you continue to use hidden text.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
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
-
Will canonical solve this?
Hi all, I look after a website which sells a range of products. Each of these products has different applications, so each product has a different product page. For eg. Product one for x application Product one for y application Product one for z application Each variation page has its own URL as if it is a page of its own. The text on each of the pages is slightly different depending on the application, but generally very similar. If I were to have a generic page for product one, and add canonical tags to all the variation pages pointing to this generic page, would that solve the duplicate content issue? Thanks in advance, Ethan
Technical SEO | | Analoxltd0 -
Will 301 affect my present Google ranking
Hello , I am in a fix right now. I have a website which is ranking well for many keywords in search engines.I am redirecting all my pages and blogs to new website with new domain name for better user experience and will be adding more content to new website. If i redirect all pages and posts from present website to new website will it affect my present rankings. What can be the possible effects that my present website will have. I need to fix this as soon as possible. I want to redirect so please tell me what best should be done as well. Thanks
Technical SEO | | wallacep0 -
Will presentational HTML tags actually be having a negative SEO effect?
Hi All, I have been using some scanning tools as usual and I keep getting notified about presentational HTML. I'm not involved in the web design but if this is actually having a negative effect then we need to get it changed. Can anyone advise? "pages of this website were found to use presentational HTML elements and/or attributes. It is widely regarded that use of presentational HTML like and should be avoided."
Technical SEO | | SanjidaKazi0 -
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,
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Will rel=canonical work here?
Dear SEOMOZ groupies, I manage several real estate sites for SEO which we have just taken over. After running the crawl on each I am find 1000's of errors relating to just a few points and wanted to find out either suggestion to fix or if the rel=canonical will resolve it as it is in bulk. Here are the problems...Every property has the following so the more adverts the more errors. each page has a contact agent url. all of these create dup title and content each advert has the same with printer friendly each advert has same with as a favorites page several other but I think you get the idea. Help!!! .... suggestions overly welcome Steve
Technical SEO | | AkilarOffice0 -
How can I optimise for Google Products?
Has anyone got experience of optimising Google Products (Google Base) feeds? I've noticed that, although my site doesn't often appear on page one in the standard results, we occasionally appear right at the top because of the "universal" shopping results. My question is: how can we make this happen more often? There seems to be a lot less competition (presumably because our competitors haven't worked out how to provide the feed to Google yet!), so I imagine it should be easier and quicker to reach the top this way than any other way. Thanks! Alex
Technical SEO | | reddogmusic0 -
Google plus
With a single Google search, you can see regular search results, along with all sorts of results that are tailored to you -- pages shared with you by your friends, Google+ posts from people you know. **Does pages shared by friends ** Does this mean pages shared by friends on Google plus ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
My site cannot be found by google at all
I don't know why but our company site can not be found by google at all. I have submitted to google webmaster, have social media point to, etc, Is there any reason for this? url for our website is www.bistosamerica.com Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0