Search visibility of website that only uses H2 tags - will not having H1 damage my visibility?
-
Excuse the basic question. I host my domain and website on Squarespace. I use a specific theme and after doing a site crawl of my site Moz picked up that Pages and Blog posts 'Missing or Invalid H1' tags (450 issues!). I discovered that my Squarespace theme only using H2 tags.
Is this a serious issue that affects my search visibility? What would you recommend that I do to fix this, if anything? I'm starting some SEO and lnikbuilding, but wanted to see if this is an issue that I need to consider.
Thanks!!!!
-
Obviously. But from my experience there was'nt really an upside to it. Basicly saying i might as well create a website with only H2 instead of the H1 till H6.
-
There are too many other factors to be able to do a before and after test.
It's still the right thing to do for visitor ease-of-use and legibility.
There is no downside to doing it - only upside.
-
Hi Sean.
We tested this on a website that recieves 1500 clicks a day by google. We waited pretty much months and saw no difference in "performance". Read my initial response to this:
-
Well, It is not a big issues these days. Google is smart enough. I totally agree with martin in this. Secondly, your title of the post would automatically be in H1 which would fulfill the requirements of having H1 tag in the post.
However, the thing which matters a lot is the on-page SEO of your site. On-page SEO of your website should be perfect.
Like your main keyword should be in H2, and all other headings which you consider important must be in H3 or H4 whatever you want as per your website's design. Moreover, do not forget to add Schema ( Google Structure Data to your site ).
I have done on-page SEO of my website properly, and have achieved good rankings after the google core may update.
-
Ive build a nummerous amount of websites over the last few years. Bin in an argument with a client who's pretty much into marketing and seo himself. H1 or H3 was missing, but H2 was widely used. We've tested this out and our conclusion was this:
It really dont matter if you have good content + quality incoming links. Hell even quality links rank sites that are stuffed with copy content. We saw no difference in months when switched to a more structured H1/H2/H3. To this day good quality links or a well optimized incoming link pattern still beats everything of the above. No matter if you have a slow loading site or completely failing W3C validator etc.
I had the same 'warning' in Moz as well; but alot of the pages still are within the top 3 or so so i dont really think this is an issue for it not to rank.
-
Why would you not have the main heading of your pages be an H1?
Yes, your rankings will suffer though you will never know by how much unless you change them to H1 and measure the difference - though the difference will be affected by other things you do and overall traffic, so it's never an apples-to-apples comparison.
H1 headings have more SEO weight than any other content on the page including H2 and other headings. That is why Moz reports missing H1 headings.
Plus, you want to use H2, H3, and other headings to break up long content (>400 words or so) so visitors can scan the page to see if it's relevant and worth reading.
-
Hi, using a proper site structure is necessary for the health of websites. If you need more stress on your keyword and want to understand your content better to google then you need to have proper site structure. Follow this site structure, I found it very helpful. https://vrltrackings.com/
-
I agree with Martijn,
These days, heading tags don't do much. More important, I'd say, are the actual words you use in those lines that contain heading tags. The beginning of the first like (like where an h1 tag would be) should include your most important words. The beginning of the following paragraph (like where a page intro/summery following an h1 tag would be) should round out/expand on that vocabulary. The following headings and paragraphs should reinforce the vocabulary of the first paragraph.
Too often, the fluff that people produce for website copy gives them little to no relevance to their desired theme/topic.
-
Hi Julio,
The fact that your site is 'just' missing H1s and likely only using H2 shouldn't be too big of an issue. I'd say that Google is smart enough to notice that you basically would use the H2 instead of the H1 everywhere. However, I would make sure that the use of the H2 is not overdoing it. If you have 6171 H2s on your page then obviously its value is minimal. It's in the end, all about the proper use of these tags, and in that case, it shouldn't matter if there is no use of the H1 tag.
Martijn.
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
-
My Website disappeared from Google Search Results overnight
Hello there, I'm the owner of the Website https://cours-toujours.com/, dedicated to reviewing running shoes. My Website is pretty young and I'm currently focused on building new reviews (so I keep adding new articles, week after week, I did not really focus on the rest of the website for now).Until a few days ago, I saw growing traffic on my Website, everything seemed good and I kept adding new reviews to my website.And then suddently traffic dropped and went to 0 in 2 days (I went from 550 impressions/day to 49 impressions/day in 2 days :/)When I look in the Google Search Console, I don't see any issue: my sitemaps are submitted and the correct number of URLs are reported I don't have any Manual Action or Security Issue I don't have any Removal Request Everything seems fine... But I can barely find my website in Google Search Results.When I do a site search (site:cours-toujours.com), I find only 2 pages of results, mostly non-important pages (categories, etc.).I asked in Google Community Forums, and i got this reply about my pages being too similar to one another (https://support.google.com/webmasters/thread/44880689?hl=en). But I'm not really happy with this answer, as all my pages have ~1000 words of unique content (even if of course they have the same structure as they are all dedicatd to reviewing a running shoe...)Any idea where this might come from/how I can fix the issue?
Technical SEO | | SimonCoursToujours0 -
Will Google still ignore the second instance of anchor text on a page if it has an H2 tag on it?
We have a page set up that has anchor text with header tags. There is an instance where the same anchor text is on the page twice linking to the same page, and I know that Google will ignore the second instance. But in the second instance it also had an H2 tag (which I removed and put it on the first instance of anchor text even though it's smaller). Is this good practice?
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Sitelinks Search Box
Hello all, I have added the suggested code to my homepage as follows but not getting box in SERP.: Is there syntax error, placement error or something else. Please help!!! This was added 2 month ago.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Cached version of website
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the mobile menu links are also coming in text format which looks weird. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:indialetsplay.com&biw=1366&bih=638&noj=1&strip=1 Our coder told us that he has created separate menu i.e. one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. Does the duplicating the menu good for on page SEO? Give the best solution for handling it.
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Is it a good idea to use the rel canonical tag to refer to the original source?
Sometimes we place our blog post also on a external site. In this case this post is duplicated. Via the post we link to the original source but is it also possible to use the rel canonical tag on the external site? For example: The original blogpost is published on http://www.original.com/post The same blogpost is published on http:///www.duplicate.com/post. In this case is it wise to put a rel canonical on http://www.duplicate.com/post like this: ? What do you think? Thanks for help! Robert
Technical SEO | | Searchresult0 -
Genesis WP Theme H1 Tag not properly Used?
I am in the process of redesigning my website, and I have been working on the Genesis framework a lot lately, so I used the Genesis framework to make my new site. The URL is http://protechig.com As I look at the H1 on the page (homepage only, every other page has solid h1s from an SEO perspective.) The first thing that I see is that the home page H1 is a links (to protech's home page). The second thing that I see is the the title text is replaced with an image (my logo) and there is a text-indent:-99999; and overflow:hiden; I just want to know from an SEO perspective if this is okay, and, if it isn't, what I could/should to to rectify it. Thanks Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Canonical tags
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
Technical SEO | | Boodreaux
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL. By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense. 🙂 Poo1 -
Tags - Should i add description for every tag ?
Hi 🙂 Should i add description for every tag in wordpress and i am using Yoast WordPress SEO and there is also option to add SEO title for tags , should i add also titles for tags ? and how should look title for tag, can you give me example from my blog : http://www.dota2club.com thank you !!!!
Technical SEO | | wolfinjo0