Hiding H1 with background colour
-
Will the H1 tag be visible to the bot if it is hidden from the human eyes using background color.
Will Google penalize my website if I hide the H1 tag using the background color so it is visible to the search engine bot but not visible to the human eye.
If I place the H1 tag in the footer (front-end location) for the human eye but at the top of the page in HTML for the bots, will the search bot still consider this as the H1 tag and rank it accordingly
Finally will you categorize this under blackhat ( I think it is not too sure)
-
I would not remove the H1 tag. Its only one of many factors in rankings but it's still important. Don't do anything shady with it just show it. It doesn't have to be huge default
size you can style it you know.
-
Thank you very much Mattew. You have been very helpful.
-
Yeah, h1s really aren't that important for search. I'm sure they have some very insignificant benefit so removing them or not won't affect much. I still recommend using them for accessibility reasons though.
-
Thank you again.
It is for design reasons as the designers think the H1 at the top does not look right with the overall design.
Another idea I am toying with is to remove the H1 altogether ...
No 3
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made
and another article saying H1 may not be that important.
Will you advise removing the H1 tag
-
I guess it really depends on why would you do that. Typically, the H1 tag should appear toward the top of the page since it is the title of the page. Anything other than that would look weird and could be considered spammy, especially if it looks like you are trying to hide keyword rich text somewhere where only robots can see it.
I've not tried what you are suggesting specifically but I have had pages with multiple h1 tags and Google seems to ignore those multiple h1s (to whatever extent h1s influence rankings). As a result, I would suspect something similar would happen if you were trying to hide the h1 in the footer.
All that being said, if as part of the design you have selected to put the h1 page name in a footer but still make that h1 page name a prominent part of the page, then I suppose it wouldn't be too big of a deal where search engine spiders are concerned.
Really though, it depends on intent. Are you trying to hide the h1? If so, don't do that because that is the point at which you cross into black hat territory and risk a penalty.
-
Thank you Matthew.
Your response is very helpful.
I seem to have only one option which is to place the H1 tag in the footer to human eyes but when you disable CSS you will see it at the top of the page.
What is your thought on this.
Cheers
-
Yep, all of those tactics will be considered black hat and those tactics will not be likely to work. Google can see hidden text and can easily detect those kinds of tactics.
Here is an article more about the hidden text and other black hat techniques. Don't do any of these!
http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/tactics/black-hat.htm
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
-
Does a tag inside H1 affect SEO?
We are using a tag inside our H1 tag to display a second line of text, usually for extra information and making the tag appeal like a intro text for the visitor and not just a optimized SEO tag. Example: https://www.denhollandsche.nl/grafmonumenten/ Does this technique affect SEO? Should we consider removing it? Natuursteen grafsteengraniet grafmonument voorbeelden
Technical SEO | | stepsstones0 -
Hiding h1 tags in Magento
Hi Moz Community, I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles. The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
My Article Post Title in both the h1 and the h2 are the same. Is this good seo?
I'm seeing a common practice in wordpress themes where the h1 tag for a page has the logo in it, then the h2 would be the title to the article. I've decided to place the title in the h1 dynamically, like this: - Joe's Auto Store where '' is the actual title to the post - the logo is still being used as a background image in the h1... So for example, the page would show this: How install a car battery - Joe's Auto Store I think this is good seo still, but the other issue is that the first, subsequent also has the exact same title because this is the actual post title, which uses the first h2 on the page to display the title. So the code would look like this: - My Company paragraph content text stuff an example would be How install a car battery - Joe's Auto Store How install a car battery At Joe's we teach how to install batteries on site. There are mor...(etc.) Is this an issue since the post title in both the h1 and h2 are nearly the same (except for the company name)? Is this good seo still?
Technical SEO | | johnnydigital0 -
Can the Breadcrumb Trail be used as the H1 tag?
We hace recently discovered that the x-cart sites we have dont have H1 tags. Can the breadcrumb trail on the category and sub category pages be used as the H1 tag?
Technical SEO | | heathshowman0 -
What happens when you put an image in an H1 tag?
I am currently updating some H1 tags for my site but the tags are generated automatically by the text that is entered into a field on our content manager software. However because we need an image in this area as well, the entire field including the code for the image is surrounded by an H1 tag. Is this bad for SEO?
Technical SEO | | eVacStore0 -
Replacing H1's with images
We host a few Japanese sites and Japanese fonts tend to look a bit scruffy the larger they are. I was wondering if image replacement for H1 is risky or not? eg in short... spiders see: Some header text optimized for seo then in the css h1 {
Technical SEO | | -Al-
text-indent: -9999px;
} h1.header_1{ background:url(/images/bg_h1.jpg) no-repeat 0 0; } We are considering this technique, I thought I should get some advise before potentially jeopardising anything, especially as we are dealing with one of the most important on page elements. In my opinion any attempt to hide text could be seen as keyword stuffing, is it a case that in moderation it is acceptable? Cheers0 -
Page with h1 and h1 class=
Hi, If a page in the source code has boht following elements: class="blogg_rubrik">TITLE OF THE PAGE Is that bad for SEO, since the first H1 is empty? Shouldn't a page use only one H1?
Technical SEO | | Ypsilon0