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 bonafidetag 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
-
Good to use disallow or noindex for these?
Hello everyone, I am reaching out to seek your expert advice on a few technical SEO aspects related to my website. I highly value your expertise in this field and would greatly appreciate your insights.
Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
Below are the specific areas I would like to discuss: a. Double and Triple filter pages: I have identified certain URLs on my website that have a canonical tag pointing to the main /quick-ship page. These URLs are as follows: https://www.interiorsecrets.com.au/collections/lounge-chairs/quick-ship+black
https://www.interiorsecrets.com.au/collections/lounge-chairs/quick-ship+black+fabric Considering the need to optimize my crawl budget, I would like to seek your advice on whether it would be advisable to disallow or noindex these pages. My understanding is that by disallowing or noindexing these URLs, search engines can avoid wasting resources on crawling and indexing duplicate or filtered content. I would greatly appreciate your guidance on this matter. b. Page URLs with parameters: I have noticed that some of my page URLs include parameters such as ?variant and ?limit. Although these URLs already have canonical tags in place, I would like to understand whether it is still recommended to disallow or noindex them to further conserve crawl budget. My understanding is that by doing so, search engines can prevent the unnecessary expenditure of resources on indexing redundant variations of the same content. I would be grateful for your expert opinion on this matter. Additionally, I would be delighted if you could provide any suggestions regarding internal linking strategies tailored to my website's structure and content. Any insights or recommendations you can offer would be highly valuable to me. Thank you in advance for your time and expertise in addressing these concerns. I genuinely appreciate your assistance. If you require any further information or clarification, please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you. Cheers!0 -
Non Published Wordpress Pages
Hi, Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | aua1 -
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Redirect non slash to slash
Hello SEO gurus We have an issue here ( www.xyz.com.au) is having 200 responses www.xyz.com.au and www.xyz.com.au/ ( when i ran the crawl test i found this ) We have been advised to do a 301 from non slash to slash ( as our other pages are showing up with slash ) for the consistency we decided to go with this but our devs just couldnt do it. Error is - redirect loop and this site is a wordpress one Can anyone help us with this issue? Help is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Pack0 -
Custom hreflang tags in WP & using with Yoast
Hi My clients dev has added custom fields for adding hreflang tags to head of pages such as: "Rel Type", "The URL", and "Language Code" Am i right in thinking that until a different language/country version of the site is created these can remain empty or should they still be populated once added say with some sort of global reference or best left blank since will leave the head content global by default ? Also how important is it to add charset to the language code ? since seems optional ? Also this set up is on WP multi-site with Yoast and devs asked me the below: _One thing to note is that Yoast generates its own "canonical" tags - so if _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
_you are going to use hreflang tags and canonical tags then you don't need to _
_add a canonical using the custom fields I have set up - Yoast has that _
sorted. _But if you are going down the route of NOT having any canonical tags - and _
_using a x-defult for the hreflang tags, I will need to try and suppress the _
_Yoast canonical tag so you can do this. Much depends on your approach and _
what you think is best. So how do i know if using canonicals or x-default, i take it best simplest to leverage Yoast and hence not add canonicals to custom fields ? Isnt x-default just for indicating language selectors/redirector not specific to 1 region? So long as havnt got those then good to proceed with Yoasts generated canonicals ? Cheers dan0 -
Am I Wasting my time using pingler.com
Ok so here is the question. A few months ago i decided to join pingler.com and pay for the service as i was using the free service, but after four months now i have not noticed any changes and i am just wondering if i am wasting my time using the paid service. would love to hear from people who have or are using the service and let me know if this is a waste of time and my money could be better spent elsewhere. look forward to hearing your thoughts
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Redirect non-www if using canonical url?
I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to. At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls? This is the tag i have on my index.php page rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" /> If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au? Will this solve duplicate content problems? Thanks
Technical SEO | | blakadz0 -
Using Schema.org: Product or Event as the schema type?
Hello, Most of you heard from the launch of the new format for microdata: Schema.org and my question is about the different types of Schema they provide. Our websites provide an overview of courses, visitors can search/filter training courses and most important: read peer reviews. Until now we formatted (the source) of those courses with the schema type "Product" because it allows us to provide search engines with metadata about reviews via the "Aggregrated Rating". Recently we updated the information about courses, to also provide start dates and locations to users, just like the schema type for: "Events". Because we would like to provide search engines also with both types of data I would like to know your opinion. Schema.org looks like not to support the Aggregated Rating for Events and vice versa for Startdates/Locations for the Product type. And combining the two Schema types also does not looks like an option because we can't put them on the same level like it should be. So what would you recommend to use for kind of schema type(s), are we able to use the 'Product' type next to the 'Event' type and so to combine them? Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | Martijn_Scheijbeler0