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.
Using a non-visible H1
-
I have a developer that wants to use style="text-indent:-9999px" to make the H1 non-visible to the user. Being the conservative person I am, I've never tried this before and worry that Search Engines may think this is a form of cloaking. Am I worrying about nothing? And apologies if it's already been covered here. I couldn't find it. Thanks in advance!!!!
-
From Whiteboard Friday - The Biggest SEO Mistakes SEOmoz Has Ever Made
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made
"3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords
This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn't actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s."
-
Using that CSS wouldn't Hide it from the spiders view, it will simply "move" the H1 off the screen.
It is a pretty old "trick".
Lets not forget Heading tags are useful to site visitors to so shouldn't necessarily be hidden to them.
Users will use the headings whilst they Scan read your pages, if they can't quickly identify what the page content is about there is a danger they could simply bounce off... and you will lose them.
As for Search engines penalising you for it, I'm not too sure, is there any research which anybody can point us towards? I dont think they are reading CSS attributes just yet right?
Andy
-
You came to the right place for the validity you seek
I frequently vet things here in the forum and it has proven very helpful in convincing other members of my team to go one way or the other. Also, I completely agree with George's suggestion to use the "alt" attribute if it is indeed an image we are talking about, but it appears we are really talking about a bonafide
tag for text with keywords in it.
That being the case. Stick to your guns and insist on it being visible. If you really feel that it disrupts the design...it would be better to leave it out than to make it invisible.
Good luck!
Dana
-
Thanks All! So here's more detail. The home page design was completed. I still think H1 has some reasonable value and it didn't have one so I told him to put a keyword rich H1 in. He felt it disrupted the existing design and executed it as above. So....I thought I would seek "convergent validity" on the subject as a next step.
-
I concur with Dana,
Hiding your H1 tag will not necessarily cause a penalty. However, if you do so you are at risk for a penalty. If a particular savvy competitor comes along and notices you are obfuscating your H1 tags and reports it, then you may get dinged. I doubt that alone would cause a problem, but if that sort of tactic is par for the course for this web developer you may be in trouble.
-
Read up on this Webmaster Tools guideline: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
Note the following from the guideline if there is a very important reason for why your developer wants to use CSS to move the text off the page:
"However, not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site."
If there is not a very important reason, and even if there is, suggest they populate the ALT attribute of the image with the text instead.
Hope this helps!
-
The general SEO community consensus is that you should:
A. be doing what is best for the user (so not concealing the H1 tag)
B. not doing anything that could make Matt Cutts and the Google team upset
They have advised against attempting to conceal content for SEO gain so I would strongly recommend avoiding it. They have been dealing with these issues now for a LONG time, so presumably their bots can easily pick up on those tricks.
The Google bots can now "see" what is visible on the page. They discount things that are not in the visible content area so the benefit to an offset H1 would likely be none. Also: They're watching you.
-
Personally, I wouldn't do it. Does it work? Maybe. Or, maybe it works for a while and then Googlebot wises up and deindexes you. Is all the work you will have to go through for reconsideration going to justify hiding that tag? I'd say, definitely not.
It's just an
tag...leave it on the page and visible. Listen to your conservative gut and do what you know is the right thing. That's my two cents
-
I have personally created an H1 tag in an image, I didn't see no negative effects. H1 tags are not as important but should be implemented, so even if it had any impact maybe it was minuscule.
H1 tags don't generally have to be visible like in my case, it was an H1 tag for the logo. I'm not sure where you are putting the H1 tag but if its an image I say why not, but if it is a regular text, why not just keep it as an H1 without hiding?
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
-
Merge 2 websites into one, using a non-existing, new domain.
I need to merge https://www.WebsiteA.com and https://www.WebsiteB.com to a fresh new domain (with no content) https://www.WebsiteC.com. I want to do it the best way to keep existing SEO juice. Website A is the companies home page and built with Wordpress Website B is the company product page and built with Wordpress Website C will be the new site containing both website A and B, utilizing Wordpress also. What is the best way to do this? I have research a lot and keep hitting walls on how to do it. It's a little trickier because it's two different domains going to a brand new domain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | jarydcat10 -
Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail
Hi, I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
Technical SEO | | amastone
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category.
Is this a right use of the canonical?
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages. thanks marco0 -
Can you use multiple videos without sacrificing load times?
We're using a lot of videos on our new website (www.4com.co.uk), but our immediate discovery has been that this has a negative impact on load times. We use a third party (Vidyard) to host our videos but we also tried YouTube and didn't see any difference. I was wondering if there's a way of using multiple videos without seeing this load speed issue or whether we just need to go with a different approach. Thanks all, appreciate any guidance! Matt
Technical SEO | | MattWatts1 -
Can you force Google to use meta description?
Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
Does anyone use pingler and is it any good
Hi, i have joined pingler and pay per month to use it but i have not seen any difference with traffic or google rankings and i would like to know if anyone else is using the paid version of pingler.com and if they find it a good service
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does the use of sliders for text-on-page, effects SEO in any way?
The concept of using text sliders in an e-commerce site as a solution to placing SEO text above or in between product and high on ages, seems too good to be true.... or is it? How would a text slider for FAQ or other on-page text done with sliding paragraphs (similar but not this specific code- http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/08/dynamic-faq-jquery-yql-google-docs/faq.html) might effect text-on-page SEO. Does Google consider it hidden text? Would there be any other concerns or best practices with this design concept? faq.html
Technical SEO | | RKanfi0 -
Does anyone use buzzfeed to creat links traffic and increase brand
Hi i would like to know if anyone uses http://www.buzzfeed.com to create links, gain traffic and increase brand awareness. I have signed up for an account but cannot get it to work and would like some help. I can get my content on there but cannot manage to get the links to work I signed up for this account a while back and a friend shown me how to use it but i have forgotten. here is my page http://www.buzzfeed.com/lifestylemagazine some links work and some links do not. what i am trying to do is to publish stories from my site as well as other sites and have the link included where you press the title and it goes to the site any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Using hyphenated sub-domains or non-hyphenated sub-domains? What is the question! I Any takers?
For our corporate business level domain, we are exploring using a hyphenated sub-domain foir a project. Something like www.go-figure.extreme.com I thought from a user perspective it seems cluttered. The domain length might also be an issue with the new Algorithm big G has launched in recent past. I know with past experience, hyphenated domains usually take longer to index, as they are used by spammers more frequently and can take longer to get out of the supplementary index. Our company site has over 90 million viewers / year, so our brand is well established and traffic isn't an issue. This is for a corporate level project and I didn't have the answer! Will this work? anyone have any experience testing this. Any thoughts will help! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0