Will skipping <H> tags affect your SEO?
-
Will skipping <H> tags on a page have any impact on your SEO, e.g. skipping a <H2> so your page has a <H1> and then goes to a <H3>?
Obviously a page must have a <H1>, but does it matter if you skip other headings?
-
I recommend you read this content about title tags. English Content - Türkçe SEO'da başlık etiketleri I hope you benefit from it.
-
In general, well-arranged <H> tags suggest that Google bots will better understand the subject of the page, but quite often I come across websites with missing tags on the first page.
-
It is a content issue. I have worked a lot with H2 and H3 headlines and see many SERP results with sitelinks with Headlines keywords. If you optimize a content with different parts and work with tables of contents, Google can recognize the structure understand your content and evaluate it. Some parts will be shown in the featured snippets as well or in FAQs. To say that they don't have any impact is wrong.
-
I think skipping <H> tags won't affect the ranking factor in SEO.
-
This depends on page structure and if you have any additional schema such as FAQs etc.
Additional keywords within your H2/3/4 tags can be extremely useful but again it depends on keywords you are targeting and how natural these headings actually are.
It's also worth thinking about the other purposes of H tags.
Even though they may or may not have an affect on SEO - H tags help with accessibility software such as screen readers to make sense of your content.
-
Thank you @Tom-Capper and @pau4ner, this is really helpful. I guess it used to have an impact on SEO but things have changed and they're no longer as important as they were.
-
In my experience and opinion, it won't have any impact at all. I've ranked pages with one H1, a bunch of H3 and no H2. Headlines are useful to organize content for users, they don't really have direct SEO purposes (although they can affect it indirectly, as a better organized content will improve user satisfaction).
Although not a headline, something I would never skip is <title> tag (even though Google can create one/rewrite the existing one).
-
From an SEO perspective, I doubt you'd see any material impact.
Even skipping the <H1> isn't awful as long as the document's overall structure and hierarchy remains clear. See this experiment we ran a while back - https://moz.com/blog/h1-seo-experiment
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
-
Understanding Redirects and Canonical Tags in SEO: A Complex Case
Hi everyone, nothing serious here, i'm just playing around doing my experiments 🙂
Technical SEO | | chueneke
but if any1 of you guys understand this chaos and what was the issue here, i'd appreciate if you try to explain it to me. I had a page "Linkaufbau" on my website at https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau. My .htaccess file contains only basic SEO stuff: # removed ".html" using htaccess RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ (.*)\.html\ HTTP RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ $1 [R=301,L] # internally added .html if necessary RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$ RewriteRule (.*) $1\.html [L] # removed "index" from directory index pages RewriteRule (.*)/index$ $1/ [R=301,L] # removed trailing "/" if not a directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$ RewriteRule (.*)/ $1 [R=301,L] # Here’s the first redirect: RedirectPermanent /index / My first three questions: Why do I need this rule? Why must this rule be at the top? Why isn't this handled by mod_rewrite? Now to the interesting part: I moved the Linkaufbau page to the SEO folder: https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau and set up the redirect accordingly: RedirectPermanent /linkaufbau /seo/linkaufbau.html I deleted the old /linkaufbau page. I requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau in the Google Search Console. Once the page was indexed, I set a canonical to the old URL: <link rel="canonical" href="https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau"> Then I resubmitted the sitemap and requested indexing for /seo/linkaufbau again, even though it was already indexed. Due to the canonical tag, the page quickly disappeared. I then requested indexing for /linkaufbau and /linkaufbau.html in GSC (the old, deleted page). After two days, both URLs were back in the serps:: https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau.html this is the new page /seo/linkaufbau
b14ee095-5c03-40d5-b7fc-57d47cf66e3b-grafik.png This is the old page /linkaufbau
242d5bfd-af7c-4bed-9887-c12a29837d77-grafik.png Both URLs are now in the search results and all rankings are significantly better than before for keywords like: organic linkbuilding linkaufbau kosten linkaufbau service natürlicher linkaufbau hochwertiger linkaufbau organische backlinks linkaufbau strategie linkaufbau agentur Interestingly, both URLs (with and without .html) redirect to the new URL https://chriseo.de/seo/linkaufbau, which in turn has a canonical pointing to https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau (without .html). In the SERPs, when https://chriseo.de/linkaufbau is shown, my new, updated snippet is displayed. When /linkaufbau.html is shown, it displays the old, deleted page that had already disappeared from the index. I have now removed the canonical tag. I don't fully understand the process of what happened and why. If anyone has any ideas, I would be very grateful. Best regards,
Chris0 -
Footer backlink for/to Web Design Agency
I read some old (10+ years) information on whether footer backlinks from the websites that design agencies build are seen as spammy and potentially cause a negative effect. We have over 150 websites that we have built over the last few years, all with sitewide footer backlinks back to our homepage (designed and managed by COMPANY NAME). Semrush flags some of the links as potential spammy links. What are the current thoughts on this type of footer backlink? Are we better to have 1 dofollow backlink and the rest of the website nofollow from each domain?
Link Building | | MultiAdE1 -
How to stop /tag creating duplicate content - Wordpress
Hi, I keep getting alert for duplicate content. It seems Wordpress is creating it through a /tag https://www.curveball-media.co.uk/tag/cipr/ https://www.curveball-media.co.uk/tag/pr-agencies/ Something in the way we've got Wordpress set up?
Technical SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Missing xml tag error
Our xml sitemap is divided up in to many smaller xml sitemaps so we have fewer products per sitemap, in order to easily identify errors. A couple of weeks ago, we changed our xml sitemap by reordering some of the products. However, this has left some old xml sitemaps without any data, and they are no longer appearing in our xml sitemap. But, Google is still identifying these sitemaps since they once existed, and they are giving errors since they can't locate them. Should we 404 those xml sitemaps, or is there a better way to handle this?
Technical SEO | | ang0 -
Does anyone know if an increase in 804 HTTPS errors will affect SEO rankings?
We recently moved our whole site over from HTTP to HTTPS and we went from having 106 keywords in the top 3 positions to 80 in just one week. The only thing that I can think of that caused the drop is the HTTPS changes to our site. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SimonWorsfold0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0