Search visibility of website that only uses H2 tags - will not having H1 damage my visibility?
-
Excuse the basic question. I host my domain and website on Squarespace. I use a specific theme and after doing a site crawl of my site Moz picked up that Pages and Blog posts 'Missing or Invalid H1' tags (450 issues!). I discovered that my Squarespace theme only using H2 tags.
Is this a serious issue that affects my search visibility? What would you recommend that I do to fix this, if anything? I'm starting some SEO and lnikbuilding, but wanted to see if this is an issue that I need to consider.
Thanks!!!!
-
Obviously. But from my experience there was'nt really an upside to it. Basicly saying i might as well create a website with only H2 instead of the H1 till H6.
-
There are too many other factors to be able to do a before and after test.
It's still the right thing to do for visitor ease-of-use and legibility.
There is no downside to doing it - only upside.
-
Hi Sean.
We tested this on a website that recieves 1500 clicks a day by google. We waited pretty much months and saw no difference in "performance". Read my initial response to this:
-
Well, It is not a big issues these days. Google is smart enough. I totally agree with martin in this. Secondly, your title of the post would automatically be in H1 which would fulfill the requirements of having H1 tag in the post.
However, the thing which matters a lot is the on-page SEO of your site. On-page SEO of your website should be perfect.
Like your main keyword should be in H2, and all other headings which you consider important must be in H3 or H4 whatever you want as per your website's design. Moreover, do not forget to add Schema ( Google Structure Data to your site ).
I have done on-page SEO of my website properly, and have achieved good rankings after the google core may update.
-
Ive build a nummerous amount of websites over the last few years. Bin in an argument with a client who's pretty much into marketing and seo himself. H1 or H3 was missing, but H2 was widely used. We've tested this out and our conclusion was this:
It really dont matter if you have good content + quality incoming links. Hell even quality links rank sites that are stuffed with copy content. We saw no difference in months when switched to a more structured H1/H2/H3. To this day good quality links or a well optimized incoming link pattern still beats everything of the above. No matter if you have a slow loading site or completely failing W3C validator etc.
I had the same 'warning' in Moz as well; but alot of the pages still are within the top 3 or so so i dont really think this is an issue for it not to rank.
-
Why would you not have the main heading of your pages be an H1?
Yes, your rankings will suffer though you will never know by how much unless you change them to H1 and measure the difference - though the difference will be affected by other things you do and overall traffic, so it's never an apples-to-apples comparison.
H1 headings have more SEO weight than any other content on the page including H2 and other headings. That is why Moz reports missing H1 headings.
Plus, you want to use H2, H3, and other headings to break up long content (>400 words or so) so visitors can scan the page to see if it's relevant and worth reading.
-
Hi, using a proper site structure is necessary for the health of websites. If you need more stress on your keyword and want to understand your content better to google then you need to have proper site structure. Follow this site structure, I found it very helpful. https://vrltrackings.com/
-
I agree with Martijn,
These days, heading tags don't do much. More important, I'd say, are the actual words you use in those lines that contain heading tags. The beginning of the first like (like where an h1 tag would be) should include your most important words. The beginning of the following paragraph (like where a page intro/summery following an h1 tag would be) should round out/expand on that vocabulary. The following headings and paragraphs should reinforce the vocabulary of the first paragraph.
Too often, the fluff that people produce for website copy gives them little to no relevance to their desired theme/topic.
-
Hi Julio,
The fact that your site is 'just' missing H1s and likely only using H2 shouldn't be too big of an issue. I'd say that Google is smart enough to notice that you basically would use the H2 instead of the H1 everywhere. However, I would make sure that the use of the H2 is not overdoing it. If you have 6171 H2s on your page then obviously its value is minimal. It's in the end, all about the proper use of these tags, and in that case, it shouldn't matter if there is no use of the H1 tag.
Martijn.
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
-
Mobile website indexing
Hi we have a mobile version of our website at mobile.gardening-services-edinburgh.com its been live for 5, maybe 6 months, it has its own mobile-sitemap.xml have tried submitting this sitemap to google and for some reason it does not index these pages any ideas, most welcome
Technical SEO | | McSEO0 -
Is the content on my website is garbage?
I received a mail from google webmasters, that my website is having low quality content. Website - nowwhatmoments.com
Technical SEO | | Green.landon0 -
Website Revision
Hi all~ We are completely remaking our website: www.containmydog.com. I believe we have a good handle on the visual aspects of the redesign. What are the backend or behind the scenes (probably not using the technical term) things that need to be done so search engines know where things are. For example i know we are not going to remove some pages , change were some pages are on the site and add new pages. Is there a checklist that lists the important things to do when designing/redesigning a website? If there is not a checklist what are the things I should be asking the web person we hire?
Technical SEO | | PhotographerSteve1 -
Launching Website
We are developing a new website and thinking google would not find it because of the directory we put it in (no homepage yet) and because there are no links to it. For example, we are building it in this directory example.com/wordpress/ but somehow google found it and indexed pages not ready to be indexed. What should we do to stop this until we are ready to launch? Should we just use a robots.txt file with this in it? User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | QuickLearner
Disallow: / Will this create repercussions when we officially launch?0 -
What if meta description tag comes before meta title tag? Do the search engines disregard or penalize if the order is not title then description in the HTML?
Do the search engines disregard or penalize if the order is not title then description in the HTML? A client's webmaster is a newbie to SEO and did just this. Suggestions?
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Damage Control
So here's the deal.....I HAVE to link my external website www.ldnwicklesscandles.com....and any shopping/ecommerce sections of it to my company sponsored website: ukwicklessscents.scentsy.co.uk so all transactions go through that. Why do a separate website you might ask? ....our company websites are extremely limited in design and content we're allowed to add like blogs, etc, etc and things to add content to help with longtail searches. So most of us involved with the company do external sites and link to our other sites. Which means I have link juice spread over the two sites because so much of the site is linking out...which most means I've got to work twice as hard. Although my hands are really tied with a lot of things with this, I'm wondering if there's anything you might recommend to lessen the damage so to speak....maybe like changing the navigational structure of my external website so I'm only linking out when absolutely necessary? I've been reading about navigational structure and it mentions the home page should only link out to the most important pages? Would this work? Maybe none of this is something I should worry about? It seems some of the high rank sites for keywords like scentcity.com who are using the left side bar like I have and the main page with lots of links to her company sponsored site seem to rank despite all this?? Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated. x
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
What Google uses in search result descriptions
Recently, Google has started including certain information from our web pages in their search results description that is a bit puzzling. For example if you google 'Wedding Band Raleigh' the description they are using for our site's (GigMasters) page begins with the text 'Results 1 - 10 of 1005' Not sure why they are pulling that information. That is in on the page but its not high up on the page or marked with any special h1, h2, or h3 tag. We do have that information inside of a div which we have named 'Results'. Maybe that's why? Did we inadvertently use some sort of Google rich snippet or schema.org naming convention?! Any insight would be hugely appreciated.
Technical SEO | | gigmasters0