Multiple H1 Tags on Page
-
Can having multiple H1 tags on a webpage be detrimental to its rankings?
-
Hello Chad,
Absolutely, depending on how you structure your tags. The biggest problem with multiple H1's is that using different keywords can confuse Google and Users about what a page is attempting to rank for. If you have multiple keywords you are attempting to rank for, you are better off creating different pages with a small number of H1's optimized to each keyword respectively. This will help Google contextualize the page.
This comes up frequently on Moz Q&A, and opinion has shifted throughout the years, but it is now considered best practice to use a single keyword/H1 tag for each page for best ranking potential.
Hope this helps,
Rob
-
Just like you want to have a single title tag you want to optimally have a single H1. Use of the H1 (and H2 H3s for that matter) helps Google to understand the hierarchy of information on your page. By having multiple H1s you are potentially not giving as clear of a signal of what text is most important on your page. It is also good for users as they can clearly and quickly see what your page is about and increase the chances of staying on your page, thereby reducing bounce rate and potentially increasing conversion rate.
That said, regarding rankings, this all depends. I can't promise that if you fix your H1 that you will rank #1 - there are just too many other factors to consider. Can you rank well with having multiple H1s, sure. Google still may be able to "figure it out".
Still, best practice is to have a single H1 as far as what most SEOs (and SEOs that I respect) recommend and this is what I do on all of my sites.
Some other posts on this topic that are of this ilk:
https://moz.com/community/q/h1-tag
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/in-2014-how-important-is-an-h1-tag-for-seo/
https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-peroperly-use-h1-h2-and-h3-tag-on-your-website
http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/
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
-
Will redirecting a logged in user from a public page to an equivalent private page (not visible to google) impact SEO?
Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers
Technical SEO | | bernienabo0 -
Noindex meta tag
Hi When following Webmaster Tools/Optimization/HTML Improvements it says that we have duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions for hundreds of pages, As corrective action we have added to those pages and also changed title tags to make sure that they are different but still Webmaster keeps reporting that the duplication exist. Is it possible that google bot doesn't see our noindex code while crawling? By the way our seomoz report says that there is no duplicate title tag or meta description on our site google has crawled our site today and we received our report from seomoz today thanks
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Canoical tags how do i use them
Hi i have this coming up on the report for my url www.in2town.co.uk but i am not sure how to use the canonical tag. I am using joomla and would be grateful if anyone could please give me advice on how to use this. Canonical URL Tag Usage Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt> <dd>0</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.</dd> <dd>many thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
</dd> </dl>0 -
H1 - site name or page title?
Hi all, I have always used h1 tags for the site name and then h2 tags for the page title, thus: Bob's Chunky Bacon Store Smoked Bacon Bacon bacon bacon bacon etc... My reasoning for this is I believe it is semantically correct. The h1 represents a book's title and the h2 the name of a chapter. I seem to have read, in a few places, that my h1 should be the page title: Bob's Chunky Bacon Store Smoked Bacon Bacon bacon bacon bacon etc... From a SEO view, which of these is the better approach? Thanks in advance for any input.
Technical SEO | | jimneath0 -
Can you have multiple rich snippets show up for the same page
Is it possible to have multiple rich snippets show up in the SERPs for the same page?For example, could a product page have both the aggregate review rich snippet and also the author thumbnail?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Googleoff/on tags
Hi all, I'd like to restrict Google indexing a part of content on the page. Does tag really work for it as it described on https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/46/admin_crawl/Preparing#pagepart? Thanks, Jane
Technical SEO | | Jane_Barry0 -
Consolidate page strength
Hi, Our site has a fair amount of related/similiar content that has been historically placed on seperate pages. Unfortuantely this spreads out our page strength across multiple pages. We are looking to combine this content onto one page so that our page strength will be focused in one location (optimized for search). The content is extensive so placing it all on one page isn't ideal from a user experience (better to separate it out). We are looking into different approaches one main "tabbed" page with query string params to seperate the seperate pages. We'll use an AJAX driven design, but for non js browsers, we'll gracefully degrade to separate pages with querystring params. www.xxx.com/content/?pg=1 www.xxx.com/content/?pg=2 www.xxx.com/content/?pg=3 We'd then rel canonical all three pages to just be www.xxx.com/content/ Same concept but useAJAX crawlable hash tag design (!#). Load everything onto one page, but the page could get quite large so latency will increase. I don't think from an SEO perspective there is much difference between options 1 & 2. We'll mostly be relying on Google using the rel canonical tag. Have others dealt with this issue were you have lots of similiar content. From a UX perspective you want to separate/classifiy it, but from an SEO perspective want to consolidate? It really is very similiar content so using a rel canonical makes sense. What have others done? Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Multiple h1 headers in a slideshow
I’ve built a slideshow and each slide contains an image, h1 and text contained within a div. The slideshow grabs the whole div and slides it. My question is should I remove the h1 and style it with css e.g. my slide header or leave in the multiple h1 headers. All thoughts and comments welcome.
Technical SEO | | RodneyRiley0