Changing H1 Tag based on referrer
-
Hello,
I need some quick help and advice. We're going through a website re-design, and we have a few H1 tags set on some of our inner pages. The team is ok with these, however they want to change the H1 tag if the user gets to that page from a page within the site.
Example:
When the referrer is our site (www.domain.com), the H1 tag = Go to Step 2When the referrer is anything else, the H1 tag = Welcome to our site
I'd like to keep the H1 tag as the SEO rich keyword text we agreed on (in this case "Welcome to Our Site"), however our developers don't think its directional enough and wants to change it based on the user path.
I'm ok with the suggestion, however I want to make sure that if we choose the option with the referrer that this doesn't impact our SEO efforts.
I'm assuming the referrer will changed based on how the bot gets to the page, but i'm not certain and was wondering if anyone had some thoughts on this..
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks...
-
Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon.
That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor. Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google.
I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.
-
Good question.. I'm not sure but inclined to say that googlebot wont accept sessions either. They used to have many problems with sessions and would index pages with session ids (don't see those anymore). Hopefully whatever they changed would help you too.
-
Hey,
Thank you..that helps..Welcome to our site isn't the keyword rich text i was referring to..lol..was just trying to keep it as general as possible...
Also, would this be the same if we used session instead?
-
I don't see how "Welcome to Our Site" is keyword rich but you can make the message changing cookie based instead. Since Googlebot doesn't accept cookies, it will always see "Welcome to Our Site".
Googlebot can't read cookie experiment - http://www.danclarkie.co.uk/googlebot-javascript-ajax-and-cookies-its-complicated.html
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
-
Is placing an H1 tag below a slideshow a bad practice?
Hello All, It is to my understanding that it is a best practice to have a single H1 headline that corresponds to your title tag at the top of your page, above your content for the best On-Site Optimization. We are developing a site that uses a big slideshow with text on each slide, and are concerned that placing the H1 Headline below this will be a bad practice. Would a better option be to have the slide show text on the image and place no alt tags on the slides, so that the crawlers accessing the page overlook this and see the H1 below the slider first? We need to maintain the slider for design purposes, but would like the site to optimized. A similar example to what the slider will look like is as follows: http://www.boviskyle.com/ However, we look to have optimized, "10x" content below the slider with a solid H1 headline as well. Thank You!
Web Design | | Armen-SEO0 -
Website Home page suddenly disappeared after changing Hosting
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Last week we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. We used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Web Design | | Verve-Innovation0 -
SEO Consulting for HUGE Website. How Big Is TOO Big Of A Change?
SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do... MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have. If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them? Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
Web Design | | BrianGilmore
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the Article I want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff. EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.0 -
Does using role="heading" instead of H1 in HTML code affects SEO?
Does using role="heading" instead of affect SEO? http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Headings_using_role%3Dheading
Web Design | | LNEseo0 -
Does changing nameservers and a new site design affect SEO dramatically
We are about to change nameservers and upload a new website design design, completely rebuilt website to that new hosting, will this effect our seo efforts previously and have an effect on our SEO rankings?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Canonical Tag
I've been helping someone out with their website, and I noticed the person who built the site made the canonical tags like this:
Web Design | | StandUpCubicles
href="http://www.example.com/" rel="canonical" /> I'm use to seeing it how seomoz does it: Does this matter? Is it ok to have it inverted? They also have another canonical tag in there like this:
var hs_canonical_url = "http\x3A\x2F\x2Fwww.example.com\x2Fhome" Any idea what that is? Could it be hurting the site?0 -
How to Add canonical tags on .ASPX pages?
What is the proper way (or is it possible) to add canonical tags on website pages that end in .aspx? If you add a canonical tag to the Master Page it will put that exact canonical tag on every page, which is bad. Is there a different version of the tag to put on individual pages? And one to put on the home page without the Master Page error?
Web Design | | Ryan-Bradley0 -
Javascript changing URL - Thoughts?
So, our developer just created a player at the bottom of this site I work for. It's not really important what it is. The thing is, when you go to our home page now, the javascript changes the url from www.site.com to www.site.com/home It's not actually redirected or anything (no 301, it's just the javascript doing this), but I'm worried that if someone links back to our site they're going to surely pull that URL to point back to, which is wrong. Also, when you go to a category, the URL changes from www.site.com/category to www.site.com/home#category. Again, it's not a redirect but I'm still worried people will link back to this since it's on the entire site now... I'm suggesting that we turn off this new feature until we find a workaround. I just wanted to confirm with you guys that this is best. Thanks
Web Design | | poolguy0