Hiding H1 with background colour

[YvonneMartin]

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)

[irvingw]

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.

[YvonneMartin]

Thank you very much Mattew.  You have been very helpful.

[Matthew_Edgar]

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.

[YvonneMartin]

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

[Matthew_Edgar]

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.

[YvonneMartin]

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

[Matthew_Edgar]

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