Multiple H2 with no direct links to content and invisible body text - is this an issue?
-
OK, so we've lost pagerank and I think it's because of the way our site works (and we operate it).
We have a videofolio, which shows on most of our pages, showcasing our work. Over time, we have tended to unpublish these pages and created new videofolio pages to show on our home page and relevant pages.
The videofolio is a set of pages, each with a title, body text and a place to insert a link to the video, which is played through a videofolio showcase on our website (www.curveball-media.co.uk). Each is set a category, e.g. film, and when the user clicks the tab for 'film', the thumbnails pop up and the user can play the video.
We have to work it this way as it's the only way to remove the videos from showing on our home page and to show new content instead. Simply deselecting a category still allows the videos to be seen when the 'all' category is selected by the user.
Last week, I found a way of bringing back these unpublished pages by removing the 'all' tab from the videofolio. Then I turned each one into a blog like structure instead. Essentially, instead of the video link being played through the videofolio, we deselected a category (e.g. animation, film etc) and left the page floating. The only way you can access it without being attached to a videofolio category is through the direct link.
By turning off the 'all' category and deselecting the page from any other categories, we were able to properly SEO these pages.
NB: If they are created for use with the videofolio, you can have only extremely limited body text and no H2, as this is the text that appears when you hover over the video thumbnail. That's just the nature of the template.
What I didn't anticipate is that now the code on the home page shows all these now (un)published pages and their corresponding H2 tags. Without a category selected, there is no way to get to these pages unless I create a direct link. I plan to do this through a blog post.
In the home page code, the entire videofolio page shows, including the body text and link to the video. **This text doesn't show on the home page though, i.e. the user never sees this text. **
1. Is it an issue to have so many similar H2 tags on the homepage?
2. Is it an issue that the code has text which is essentially invisible on the home page?
3. Is it an issue that the content is not linked to through the home page visibly?
Thanks!
-
Thank you for your response. Rather than me try and explain further (it is complicated). I've just removed the offending content from the page. Thank you for taking the time to answer.
-
Hi curveballmedia, did you see the thoughtful response Ria Parish sent you? She asked some excellent questions, and we'd love to help you figure this out if you are able to provide some clarifying information.
Christy
-
Sorry, I don't know if I'm the only one but I found this really confusing to follow and visualise. I understand if not, but is it possible to share the link so we can have a look?
Multiple H2s is fine and whether there may be an issue or not depends on how similar they are and how many exactly. Obviously 50 duplicate H2s will potentially be seen as spammy. As for the invisible text, is this hidden to users with something like display:none so is still readable by crawlers? If so, Google doesn't approve of hiding content or making content inaccessible to users with the intention of manipulating rankings. It may be seen as you deliberately attempting to get your keywords in for SEO, without it being of value to the user. With the perspective that if it it had value to the user, then it wouldn't be hidden. So it must only be there to game the search engines.
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
-
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
301 Redirect and Canonical link tag pointing in opposite directions!
I'm working on a site which redirects the non-WWW version to WWW version so, for example https://website.com/page redirects to https://www.website.com/page However, canonical link tags have been set up on the page - pointing back to the non-WWW so for example Q - is this going to cause issues and should the canonical be updated to the same version as the redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWEMII0 -
Do nofollow links affect link profile?
I've read that it's good to keep a natural link profile. Some naked links, some links going to our company name, some with anchor text, etc. Do nofollow links affect this link profile, or is it only followed links that are taken into account?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
Retailers Issue
Hi there, We have 20 retailers who are about to launch websites and are going to be selling our products on their websites, however with they have no content for these products they are wanting to take our content we have for our product pages on place the content on their websites, is this going to cause an issue for me? We are ranking well for competitive keywords in this niche and do not want to do anything to harm it. What I would say is the retailers in question of no intention short term anyway of doing anything with SEO. Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Two links from one page with different Anchor text
Example Business Name - UberPuter UberPuter targets the keywords "Computer Repairs" right from their home page. UberPuter has the option to place links on 150 of their customers pages that are happy with the service. Would it be best to place two anchor text links one with the brand name and one with the keyword anchor text in "computer repairs" pointing both at the home page or should UberPuter only place one link back to the home page for the Keyword Anchor text? To the best of my knowledge G only counts the first link on a page as a "Vote" so my thought is to only include the single link with the keyword anchor text. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0 -
Link Architecture - Xenu Link Sleuth Vs Manual Observation Confusion
Hi, I have been asked to complete some SEO contracting work for an e-commerce store. The Navigation looked a bit unclean so I decided to investigate it first. a) Manual Observation Within the catalogue view, I loaded up the page source and hit Ctrl-F and searched "href", turns out there's 750 odd links on this page, and most of the other sub catalogue and product pages also have about 750 links. Ouch! My SEO knowledge is telling me this is non-optimal. b) Link Sleuth I crawled the site with Xenu Link Sleuth and found 10,000+ pages. I exported into Open Calc and ran a pivot table to 'count' the number of pages per 'site level'. The results looked like this - Level Pages 0 1 1 42 2 860 3 3268 Now this looks more like a pyramid. I think is is because Link Sleuth can only read 1 'layer' of the Nav bar at a time - it doesnt 'hover' and read the rest of the nav bar (like what can be found by searching for "href" on the page source). Question: How are search spiders going to read the site? Like in (1) or in (2). Thankyou!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf0