Does anyone have data on the effect of multiple H1 tags on a page?

[pbailey]

One of my website's sub-domains is fed information from a job board master-template, thus my site (and hundreds of other sites) is just branded styling pulling from one external source. Because of the way this master template is set up (not very concerned with SEO best practices), I have found the need to hide the H1 coming from the master template, and display a new separate H1 in my styling.

This is being done with user-experience in mind, but how will search engines respond to having two H1s (one hidden, one visible) on a page?

I understand that a single H1 is usually ideal, and hidden page components are typically frowned upon because they don't add user value... but in this case, the hidden component is solely for the benefit of the user. I would like to find the best balance of SEO and UX, so I am very interested in any experimental data or case studies on a similar situation.

[DirkC]

There is no real issue with having multiple H1 on a page - in your case you risk that the hidden H1 is ignored. If you hide more content on the page Google could consider that you're cloaking - if it's only the H1 I guess this risk is pretty limited.

Dirk