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
-
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 -
Unsolved Keyword Research for SWISS company
lets say I am currently doing research for Health: Therapeutic massages - alternative medicine but the research has to be conducted in German as it is for a Swiss website. I am currently filling in the matrix as provided by Moz Essentials course, would it be better to first research these semantic/funnel tops in english and then translate into german and finding keywords (+ creating the keyword lists) based upon the GERMAN language? What would anyone recommend?
Keyword Explorer | | margitdanila1230 -
What Happens If I migrate my Sandbox free website to a new domain? Will my rankings be affected?
Hey Mozzers! One of my sites recently got out of the Google sandbox period (cause it started to rank for keywords) but the problem is the old domain sounds kinda uncool. I then found a new domain with a very cool name so I want to migrate my old site to the new domain. So my question is will it affect my rankings on Google? Or will my new domain be sandboxed for another year? Please help me out fast.
Technical SEO | | zachis323431 -
Youtube SEO Best Practices
Does anyone know where to find a list of SEO best practices for Youtube? Specifically...does anyone have thoughts on the SEO benefits of an @domain.com login vs @gmail.com login? Or is adding my url to the "Associated website" channel setting sufficient for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | brianvest0 -
Unique use of nofollow tag
Love the community here. I just had a quick question about the using noindex, nofollow. We are a car dealership group that uses a website provider (cobalt). Since they provide the website they are the only ones with access to remove pages etc. We can add pages but only they can remove them. There are some pages we need to have removed but according to them they are unable to remove them, (I think the manufacture might mandate having some pages), anyway some of these pages literally have nothing on them, and there isn't really any useful content we could add to them. So we are using noindex on them to ensure that they stay out of search indices, but I am wondering if we should also use nofollow on them. If I understand nofollow correctly it just means search engines won't follow the links on the page, well for most of these pages the only links on them are the navigation, and since we don't plan on adding any content to these pages and we can't remove them should we use noindex and nofollow as a way to "remove" them from the site as much as we can?
Technical SEO | | Murdock_Auto_Group0 -
Navigation links tagged as H3
I'm reviewing a website that has used the H3 tag in the Navigation Menu. I've not seen that before and first thought is it is a dodgy. Tags should relate to content on the page not link to another page. As a result of using H3 in Nav the ratio of content wrapped in Heading tags vs body content is quite high. My recommendation is to remove H3 tag from Nav but having searched Moz and not finding an article to verify that recommendation thought I'd ask the question.
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Redirecting Domain will cause SEO?
I am redirecting my domain, based on Geo Location. For example : if someone browse from india www.example.com they will redirect to www.example.in Does redirecting domain on Geo based will cause SEO or Any kind of duplicate content issue, as i am using same content on both TLDs.
Technical SEO | | anishtapan0