H-tags and Page Name best practice
-
For the past few months I've been working on a new site launch, but have been left with a couple of annoyances from my predecessor.. I've got a couple of questions about best practise (and if it's worth changing now).
For reference, a good example page is http://polestars.net/hen-party/life-drawing-hen-party/
The (external) web designer has insisted that wrapping the logo in an H1 tag (with the same branded H1 text on every page), and using an H2 for the actual title of the page is fine. I really don't believe him, but at the same time, feel like maybe google is smart enough to discern the theme of a page in this structure. Is it worth having this changed so that the actual title is the first H1?
Page naming convention
Another annoyance that I've been left with is the fact that every product page is named the same "burlesque hen party", "life drawing hen party", "whatever hen party"... It looks a little weird, but my real concern is that as we now have 60 "hen party" links in the navigation menu of a bunch of our pages, this may be seen as keyword stuffing - is this a real concern, or am I overthinking it?
-
Google likes a heading but does not insist that it is a H1 tag, but bing does.
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-h1-tag-is-missing
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-h1-tags
-
Thanks guys...
The 'names' of the pages weren't really my concern, but the fact that the name is used as the anchor text in every navigation menu - meaning that a page might have 100 internal links, and 90 of them contain the anchor text "x Hen Party" -- you don't think this is a big deal?
-
Totally agree regarding the H1s. They should be used for the main title of an article - not for branding or other "stylistic" reasons. I would definitely recommend making the change.
As for the page naming convention - if the pages have good content (with the broad terms that Vahe suggests) then I don't think it's too much of a problem. After all, I'd expect a page about burlesque hen parties to be called "burlesque hen party"! As long as you're being authentic about it.
-
Hi Alec,
Answers to your questions:
Heading Tags
The above mentioned is not fine. To get more information about the logo, search engines rely on the alt tag. This has far less value that using a text based H1 tag. If you also think about it, the same logo is being used for every page, so you are essentially using the H1 tag per page.
So yeach page needs to have a unique H1 tag and this needs to be the first title.
Page naming convention
It might be an issues depending on the content and they type of external linking done in the past. I would probably add a secondary kw target, slightly more broad on each page so that it doesn't look keyword stuffed..
Hope this helps,
Vahe
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
How to explain "No Return Tags" Error from non-existing page?
In the Search Console of our Google Webmaster account we see 3 "no return tags" errors. The attached screenshot shows the detail of one of these errors. I know that annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly. However, the originating URL (/#!/public/tutorial/website/joomla) doesn't exist anymore. How could these errors still show up? Screenshot%202016-07-11%2017.36.27.png?dl=0
Technical SEO | | Maximuxxx0 -
What's the best way to pass link juice to a page on another domain?
I'm working with a non-profit, and their donation form software forces them to host their donation pages on a different domain. I want to attempt to get their donation page to appear in their sitelinks in Google (under the main website's entry), but it seems like the organization's donation forms are at a disadvantage because they're not actually hosted on that site. I know that no matter what I do, there's no way to "force" a sitelink to appear the way I want it, but... I was trying to think if there's a way I can work around this. Do you think 1) creating a url like orgname.org/donate and having that be a 301 redirect to the donation form, and 2) using the /donate redirect all over the site (instead of linking directly to the form) would help? Are there alternatives other folks recommend?
Technical SEO | | clefevre0 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Does using cufon for H-tags etc hurt SEO?
Does the use of cufon for H-tags et al affect SEO/how Google views your website?
Technical SEO | | Alligator0 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1011 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Best practices for controlling link juice with site structure
I'm trying to do my best to control the link juice from my home page to the most important category landing pages on my client's e-commerce site. I have a couple questions regarding how to NOT pass link juice to insignificant pages and how best to pass juice to my most important pages. INSIGNIFICANT PAGES: How do you tag links to not pass juice to unimportant pages. For example, my client has a "Contact" page off of there home page. Now we aren't trying to drive traffic to the contact page, so I'm worried about the link juice from the home page being passed to it. Would you tag the Contact link with a "no follow" tag, so it doesn't pass the juice, but then include it in a sitemap so it gets indexed? Are there best practices for this sort of stuff?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0
