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.
H2 Tag Backlink - is this safe?
-
I have found that my site is getting a link from a good site, but my concern is that the link is in a H2 tag in the footer of the front page of the site
Would getting a link from a site wrapped in H2 tags be safe?
The anchor is my sites brand name
-
Glad I could help! And thanks for the 'Good Answer' vote as well. Enjoy the rest of your day

-
Great thanks. Yes I think you are correct, the H tag is the same colour as the non link text so you dont actually know its a live link.
I will ask them to change it.
Thanks for helping, appreciate your time
-
Oh well if it's actual content - i.e. they've written something about your business on the page and it's not just a 'footer link' then I can't see any problem at all in that being the link.
I think you may find you get more traffic if the link is in the text or a 'View their website' style link after the content - as it's more obvious to users that it's a link off to somewhere. From an SEO perspective I can't see an issue with this, but in terms of traffic potential possibly a better place would be in or just after the content about your business.
-
Hi Martin,
Yes its not site wide, its just in the footer on the page. We are a supporter of their business and they have put a small section about us on their site. The title of the section is our brand name and that is what is linked.
Would it be better to ask for the heading to have the link removed, and the link to be put in the text?
Yes their site isnt the best optimised from what I understand, but it does get a lot of traffic and has a lot of links to it.
Their site is a non profit company
-
I don't see how the H2 tag itself would be a problem. A bit strange from the linking site's on-page optimisation though.
What concerns me is that it's in the footer - unless it's not site-wide that could be an issue. And it may not result in traffic for you due to it not being seen.
The branded anchor text is good - as that's non-spammy.
So just check
- Not a site-wide link
- That they could change it from a H2 as that's not great for their SEO. (Add value to them!)
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 having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ1 -
Why is our noindex tag not working?
Hi, I have the following page where we've implemented a no index tag. But when we run this page in screaming frog or this tool here to verify the noidex is present and functioning, it shows that it's not. But if you view the source of the page, the code is present in the head tag. And unfortunately we've seen instances where Google is indexing pages we've noindexed. Any thoughts on the example above or why this is happening in Google? Eddy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap0 -
Backlinks from old domain
Hi, We have gone through a change of company brand name including a new domain name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agguk
We followed google recommendations at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en and it seems to have worked really well, the new domain has replaced the old in the google search results. My question: Still most of our backlinks, both anchor text and links use the old brand name and domain and it´s a slow process trying to update all references. Although they get redirected fine to the new domain (also following google recommendations), I wonder if the current scenario is doing any harm, SEO wise (other than the missed visual exposure of the new brand name) ? ...since the old brand name is not present at the new site I´m thinking of including "New brand name - previously old brand name" somewhere just to provide some sort of connection to all old backlinks, would that be unnecessary? I should mention that the old brand name actually includes our most important keyword but the new brand name does not. Thanks!0 -
Best Practices for Homepage Title Tag
Hi, I would like to know if there is any update about the best practices for the homepage title tag. I mean, a couple of years ago, it was still working placing main keywords in the homepage title tag. But since the last google SERP update, the number of characters that are being shown were reduced, and now we try to work with 55 and 56 characters. That has reduced our capacity of including many keywords on the title tag. Besides, search engines are smarter now to choose the correct inner page to show in SERP. But I am wondering if the Homepage Title should have a branded orientation or should include main keywords, cause it is still working that strategy. I would appreciatte any update in this issue. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite0 -
Canonical tag - but Title and Description are slightly different
I am building a new SEO site with a "Silo" / Themed architecture. I have a travel website selling hotel reservations. I list a hotel page under a city page - example, www.abc.com/Dallas/Hilton.html Then I use that same property under a segment within the city - example www.abc.com/Dallas/Downtown/Hilton.html, so there are two URLs with the same content Both pages are identical, except I want to customize the Title and Description. I want to customize the title and description to build a consistent theme - for example the /Downtown/Hilton page will have the words "Near Downtown" in the Title and Description, while the primary city Hilton page will not. So I have two questions about this. First, is it okay to use a canonical tag if the Title and Description are slightly different? Everything else is identical. If so, will Google crawl and comprehend the unique Title and Description on the "Downtown" silo? I want Google to see that I have several "supporting" pages to my main landing page(s). I want to present to Google 5 supporting pages in each silo that each has a supporting keyword theme. But I'm not sure if Google will consider content of pages that point to a different page using the canonical tag. Please see this supporting example: http://d.pr/i/aQPv Thanks for your insights. Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf0 -
Meta tags - are they case sensitive?
I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages, I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
Is it dangerous to have your H1 tag and your title the exact same thing? My thought was that it's not be the best use of space, but that it couldn't cause harm. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes7