Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Using a non-visible H1
-
I have a developer that wants to use style="text-indent:-9999px" to make the H1 non-visible to the user. Being the conservative person I am, I've never tried this before and worry that Search Engines may think this is a form of cloaking. Am I worrying about nothing? And apologies if it's already been covered here. I couldn't find it. Thanks in advance!!!!
-
From Whiteboard Friday - The Biggest SEO Mistakes SEOmoz Has Ever Made
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made
"3. Recommending People Use H1 Tags with Keywords
This mistake is a little bit more subtle. For years, SEOmoz recommended including keywords in the H1 of pages. After we started doing formal machine learning correlation tests we found out that this tactic didn't actually help very much at all (including the keywords in normal text in bigger fonts worked essentially the same). This was a shame because it meant we wasted time and energy convincing our clients to update their H1s."
-
Using that CSS wouldn't Hide it from the spiders view, it will simply "move" the H1 off the screen.
It is a pretty old "trick".
Lets not forget Heading tags are useful to site visitors to so shouldn't necessarily be hidden to them.
Users will use the headings whilst they Scan read your pages, if they can't quickly identify what the page content is about there is a danger they could simply bounce off... and you will lose them.
As for Search engines penalising you for it, I'm not too sure, is there any research which anybody can point us towards? I dont think they are reading CSS attributes just yet right?
Andy
-
You came to the right place for the validity you seek
I frequently vet things here in the forum and it has proven very helpful in convincing other members of my team to go one way or the other. Also, I completely agree with George's suggestion to use the "alt" attribute if it is indeed an image we are talking about, but it appears we are really talking about a bonafidetag for text with keywords in it.
That being the case. Stick to your guns and insist on it being visible. If you really feel that it disrupts the design...it would be better to leave it out than to make it invisible.
Good luck!
Dana
-
Thanks All! So here's more detail. The home page design was completed. I still think H1 has some reasonable value and it didn't have one so I told him to put a keyword rich H1 in. He felt it disrupted the existing design and executed it as above. So....I thought I would seek "convergent validity" on the subject as a next step.
-
I concur with Dana,
Hiding your H1 tag will not necessarily cause a penalty. However, if you do so you are at risk for a penalty. If a particular savvy competitor comes along and notices you are obfuscating your H1 tags and reports it, then you may get dinged. I doubt that alone would cause a problem, but if that sort of tactic is par for the course for this web developer you may be in trouble.
-
Read up on this Webmaster Tools guideline: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353
Note the following from the guideline if there is a very important reason for why your developer wants to use CSS to move the text off the page:
"However, not all hidden text is considered deceptive. For example, if your site includes technologies that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript, images, or Flash files, using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site."
If there is not a very important reason, and even if there is, suggest they populate the ALT attribute of the image with the text instead.
Hope this helps!
-
The general SEO community consensus is that you should:
A. be doing what is best for the user (so not concealing the H1 tag)
B. not doing anything that could make Matt Cutts and the Google team upset
They have advised against attempting to conceal content for SEO gain so I would strongly recommend avoiding it. They have been dealing with these issues now for a LONG time, so presumably their bots can easily pick up on those tricks.
The Google bots can now "see" what is visible on the page. They discount things that are not in the visible content area so the benefit to an offset H1 would likely be none. Also: They're watching you.
-
Personally, I wouldn't do it. Does it work? Maybe. Or, maybe it works for a while and then Googlebot wises up and deindexes you. Is all the work you will have to go through for reconsideration going to justify hiding that tag? I'd say, definitely not.
It's just an
tag...leave it on the page and visible. Listen to your conservative gut and do what you know is the right thing. That's my two cents
-
I have personally created an H1 tag in an image, I didn't see no negative effects. H1 tags are not as important but should be implemented, so even if it had any impact maybe it was minuscule.
H1 tags don't generally have to be visible like in my case, it was an H1 tag for the logo. I'm not sure where you are putting the H1 tag but if its an image I say why not, but if it is a regular text, why not just keep it as an H1 without hiding?
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 301 redirect the only way when using Vanity URLs?
We have been using vanity urls for some of our pages. Mostly the pages that have a vanity URL have a long URL length. But now the problem is, the vanity URL is getting displayed on the search engine when the particular keyword related to the page is entered. I checked the google search console, the vanity URL is indexed and the original URL remains unindexed. What should I do? Is adding 301 redirect to the vanity URLs are solution? Since some of vanity URLs are not redirecting to the original. Some of the original pages are not getting traffic. Also, can using canonical tag help?
Technical SEO | | tejasbansode0 -
Can you use multiple videos without sacrificing load times?
We're using a lot of videos on our new website (www.4com.co.uk), but our immediate discovery has been that this has a negative impact on load times. We use a third party (Vidyard) to host our videos but we also tried YouTube and didn't see any difference. I was wondering if there's a way of using multiple videos without seeing this load speed issue or whether we just need to go with a different approach. Thanks all, appreciate any guidance! Matt
Technical SEO | | MattWatts1 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Can OG titles be used as a substitute for Meta titles
We use og (open graph) titles in lieu of meta titles. Is there any downside to using just one. Should we be using both og and meta titles on our page. Appreciate any insight. Himanshu
Technical SEO | | patilhimanshu0 -
Custom hreflang tags in WP & using with Yoast
Hi My clients dev has added custom fields for adding hreflang tags to head of pages such as: "Rel Type", "The URL", and "Language Code" Am i right in thinking that until a different language/country version of the site is created these can remain empty or should they still be populated once added say with some sort of global reference or best left blank since will leave the head content global by default ? Also how important is it to add charset to the language code ? since seems optional ? Also this set up is on WP multi-site with Yoast and devs asked me the below: _One thing to note is that Yoast generates its own "canonical" tags - so if _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
_you are going to use hreflang tags and canonical tags then you don't need to _
_add a canonical using the custom fields I have set up - Yoast has that _
sorted. _But if you are going down the route of NOT having any canonical tags - and _
_using a x-defult for the hreflang tags, I will need to try and suppress the _
_Yoast canonical tag so you can do this. Much depends on your approach and _
what you think is best. So how do i know if using canonicals or x-default, i take it best simplest to leverage Yoast and hence not add canonicals to custom fields ? Isnt x-default just for indicating language selectors/redirector not specific to 1 region? So long as havnt got those then good to proceed with Yoasts generated canonicals ? Cheers dan0 -
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 -
Does anyone use pingler and is it any good
Hi, i have joined pingler and pay per month to use it but i have not seen any difference with traffic or google rankings and i would like to know if anyone else is using the paid version of pingler.com and if they find it a good service
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is it bad (black hat) to have an H1 text as a text indent?
Is it bad practice to use a text indent through CSS for H1 text on a homepage(basically hiding h1 text)? I'm just trying to compensate for the fact that some text that should really be in the h1 tag is actually an image.
Technical SEO | | inc.com1