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Thank you!!! That's exactly what I was thinking, but was unsure. How long would you take your sample for, though? Two weeks? They have a super high-impact site, but all their SEO is news-y, so the pages wouldn't have much time to live.

That's kind of my worry about testing, is that their pages are all entertainment news, so they have an expiration date. So declining on page-search that I track may be due to its age and not anything I'm doing.

Anyway, thank you SO MUCH William!

Any other suggestions more than welcome. Thanks again, guys!

SEO Consulting for a HUGE Website. Their h1 tags have instagram/twitter, h2 have their menu/what's trending and h3 is the article title. Here's what I want to do...

MY MAIN QUESTION: This site has tens of thousands of pages, all articles beyond the few dozen category/tag pages they have.

If I change the structure to the following, will it be too much of a system shock to Google? Will this actually HURT them?

Currently on the site: - h1 tags point to Twitter/Instagram sidebar widgets
h2 tags point to the menu/what’s trending section (which is the same on every page)
h3 points to the Title of the Article

I want to change it to this: - h1 tags should delineate the article's name. That's all they should really be used for.
h2-4 should be reserved for article subheadings to be used by the editorial staff.

EDIT: 30% of their >11 million monthly uniques come from search. I don't want to eff with that, but the way that NONE of their pages have optimized words, they have no sitemap, webmaster tools and are still doing this well makes me think that even putting in minimal changes to tidy things up will help them bring it to 70% organic search.