Will Google penalize my website if I hide the H1 tag?

[joeko]

If I hide H1 tag (title on the homepage) with CSS, how Google handle with my site?

[Esaky]

Thank You Irving and Ricky !

My WordPress Premium Theme has inside an article - shows the title as H1 and if we add the h2 tag it will show in the SEOMoz plugin.

But in the homepage My H1 is not found and every time, i update the blog with the new article - the first article is mentioned as H2.

So in Homepage, Changing the H2 title frequently will it have some problem ?

[RickyShockley]

Ah yes, I thought you meant you were going to disregard the actual H1, if you are hiding text, certainly not a good idea!

[irvingw]

Hidden text can get you penalized. It sounds like you want to position the CSS off of the page. Don't do it.

You can style the H1 to look like whatever you want, there is no need for it to be the huge default size so I see no reason to play schtick with your H1 tag.

[RickyShockley]

I assume not. I believe Google will just use your first line of content as the H1! I think Rand did a video on this not too long ago. I don't think he believes H1s were very important.