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.
Does an H1 have to be at the top of a page?
-
Because H1 "may" carry some weight with Google does it have to be placed at the top of the page? Can I place it towards the bottom of the page instead in normal body size? My goal is to keep the main keywords in the H1 but create a much friendlier title for the customer to read at the top of the page.
-
Thats exactly what we are thinking of doing
Make h2 bigger and at the top and H1 lower down and less obvious. I'm glad that the feedback has been the same as what we feel. -
yeah it confirms what I feel thanks
-
Because H1 tags are meant be explain what the page is about, it's good practice to have them at the top of the page. If you absolutely want to have a friendlier title, make it an H2 that is styled to be bigger than your H1, and style an H2 for that main header of your page. Does that make sense?
-
The role of an H1 influencing rankings has certainly diminished, but I would still say it's worth having a keyword in there.
What it sounds like to me is that you're designing your page around the user first, and SEO/H1s second and that's exactly how it should be.
Now, in theory, the higher up you can have the H1 tag the better - as search engine crawlers do crawl linearly from top to bottom - and it is has been said that the crawlers sometimes do not crawl the entire page. For that reason, you'd want it nearer the top as possible.
But I'd certainly not want to skew the flow of the site just to force an H1 tag to appear higher - certainly not in this day and age where the H1 is less of a ranking factor. I'd be confident that by having it in there somewhere in the of your site is more than good enough. If you want, visit the site that's linked in my profile - we actually use an H1 tag that's lower down the page as well and not had any worries over it thus far.
Hope this is some use to you!
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
-
Images on their own page?
Hi Mozers, We have images on their own separate pages that are then pulled onto content pages. Should the standalone pages be indexable? On the one hand, it seems good to have an image on it's own page, with it's own title. On the other hand, it may be better SEO for crawler to find the image on a content page dedicated to that topic. Unsure. Would appreciate any guidance! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater1 -
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Date of page first indexed or age of a page?
Hi does anyone know any ways, tools to find when a page was first indexed/cached by Google? I remember a while back, around 2009 i had a firefox plugin which could check this, and gave you a exact date. Maybe this has changed since. I don't remember the plugin. Or any recommendations on finding the age of a page (not domain) for a website? This is for competitor research not my own website. Cheers, Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Page position dropped on Google
Hey Guys, My web designer has recommended this forum to use, the reason being: my google position has been dropped from page 1 to page 10 in the last week. The site is weloveschoolsigns.co.uk, but our main business site is textstyles.co.uk the school signs are a product of text styles. I have been told off my SEO company, that because I have changed the school logo to the text styles logo, Google have penalised me for it, and dropped us from page 1 for numerous keywords, to page 10 or more. They have also said that duplicate content within the school site http://www.weloveschoolsigns.co.uk/school-signs-made-easy/ has also a contributed to the drop in positions. (this content is not on the textstyles site) Lastly they said, that having the same telephone number is a definate no no. They said that I have been penalised, because google see the above as trying to monopolise on the market. I don’t know if all this is true, as the SEO is way above my head, but they have quoted me £1250 to repair all the errors, when the site only cost £750. They have also mentioned that because of the above changes, the main text styles site will also be punished. Any thoughts on this matter would be much appreciated as I don't know whether to pay them to crack on, or accept the new positions. Either way I'm very confused. Thanks Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TextStylesUK0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Stuck on Page 2 - What Would You Do?!?
My site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e My main keyword is : Plastic Bins i have been going back and forth between page 1 and 2 for this keyword and i was wondering if any of you could provide any guidance as to why i can't get on the top of page 1, and stay there... My site has been around for a while, we believe we have a great user experience, all unique, fresh content, and the lowest prices... I must be missing out on something major if I cannot get a steady page 1 ranking... Any thoughts? Thanks in advance...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0