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
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
Changed url and now not listing
hi guys I had this page "https://www.stauntonrook.co.uk/marketing-services/offline/corporate-identity/" indexed in google at position 5 for a search term, after some research in the keyword planner I decided to change my url to https://www.stauntonrook.co.uk/marketing-services/offline/logo-design/ because I wanted the keyword in the url. I added a 301 redirect to the htaccess and removed the old page from google using webmaster tools fully expecting the new url to drop back in anytime hopefully in a better position than 5, now after a good week or so, still nothing 😞 also doesn't seem to be in any of the other search engines either I've updated the xml too any ideas?
Web Design | | Staunton_Rook0 -
When rel canonical tag used, which page does Google considers for ranking and indexing? A/B test scenario!
Hi Moz community, We have redesigned our website and launched for A/B testing using canonical tags from old website to new website pages, so there will be no duplicate content issues and new website will be shown to the half of the website visitors successfully to calculate the metrics. However I wonder how actually Google considers it? Which pages Google will crawl and index to consider for ranking? Please share your views on this for better optimisation. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Auto - update of h1 to h2
Hi, I have recently inherited an ecommerce website and been tasked with improving SEO. I noticed a lot of pages were using several h1 tags and, with the help of my developer, used the css to overwrite the secondary headings as h2 tags. However, since doing so many of the pages have fallen 15-40 places in the SERPS. The h1 / h2 switch was the only update. Can anyone suggest why the pages would have fallen like this, and if it is a temporary measure likely to recover in time? Thanks to anyone in advance for your help...
Web Design | | DavidIainJeffrey0 -
Is placing an H1 tag below a slideshow a bad practice?
Hello All, It is to my understanding that it is a best practice to have a single H1 headline that corresponds to your title tag at the top of your page, above your content for the best On-Site Optimization. We are developing a site that uses a big slideshow with text on each slide, and are concerned that placing the H1 Headline below this will be a bad practice. Would a better option be to have the slide show text on the image and place no alt tags on the slides, so that the crawlers accessing the page overlook this and see the H1 below the slider first? We need to maintain the slider for design purposes, but would like the site to optimized. A similar example to what the slider will look like is as follows: http://www.boviskyle.com/ However, we look to have optimized, "10x" content below the slider with a solid H1 headline as well. Thank You!
Web Design | | Armen-SEO0 -
Changing URL's for a website redesign
Hi folks, We're redesigning our website and looking for some advice on how changing our URL's would affected our rankings. If the page URLs are changing how can we carry out redirects to avoid losing any SEO rank? Thanks, Ross
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
How do search engines interpret <hgroup>...</hgroup> tags?
Hi there. I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new <hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation. In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity? For example, say I have: <hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup> How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the <hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single tag (" Article Heading: Article Sub-heading ") or two separate heading tags (one and one )? Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes? <hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup> One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)? Thanks! </hgroup> </hgroup>
Web Design | | LMDNYC2 -
Java-script slider & H1 tags
If you have a java-script slider on the homepage, each slide has an H1 tag heading, which of the H1 tags would google most likely consider? all of them or just the first one?
Web Design | | GraphicMail0