yes screen readers use them but why not incorporate them in the site with css? It will help their rankings!

Rather than trying to get them to remove them, argue the seo case for them to show them.

they will get slapped at some point, if googlebot does not get them a disgruntled website owner that has a penalty will look at the top ten results, notice it and report them.

It is a direct violation of Google terms https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en

There is no problem in my opinion with using css to style your H1 tags so that they look nice on your site. But if you hide them you are just waiting for a penalty.

Also googlebot is much smarter than it was this time last year it is able to look at pages and see the content on the page rather than just looking at the code. this was part of the hummingbird release to target ad heavy sites above the fold but also looks for large logo's and content above the fold. All of this leads to the fact that Google knows what is visible and what is not and will rank you according to those factors. the H1 tags might be giving them no benefit at all right now without them realizing, When in fact they could be benefiting from them. how much business will they lose when they lose all their rankings for 3 weeks or maybe longer? Is it worth what they think they are gaining from it.

If they are really stubborn you could tell them to change a page or two and test it out. Do a fetch in WMT so the page is indexed quickly and see the results over the course of the week.

It is unlikely because Google normally gives preference to the original for a fairly long period of time. However with Google there are no certainties but they do get this right in almost all cases I have seen.

The only users you should see decline on your site are non UK visitors as you are telling them with default-x that they should be sent to the .com

There are many huge companies adopting this process and also thousands of other smaller sites, I think Google has ironed out most of the issues over the last 2 years. You are more likely to see a slower uptake on the new domain than the original than the other way around.

Hope that helps

The actual page you want to look at is https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

hreflang is the tag you should implement.

I have had long chats with John Mueller at Google about this.

Your setup should be something like this on all pages on both sites.

Within about 7 days depending on the size of your website the .com should appear in favor of the .co.uk for your US based results. For me it happened within an hour!

Setting your .com as a default will be better than setting your co.uk.  The co.uk is already a region specific TLD and will not rank well generally in other search engines even if set in the hreflang to do differently.

This will let Google decide where to send traffic too based on their algo/data.

If you use a canonical tag you will be suggesting/pushing US users to the original content instead of the US site.

OK, so as I expected there would be nobody able to answer this question

So I asked John Mueller at Google!

I got a very precise answer.

widget

A div with an onclick is nofollow. so this would be a bad idea if you want internal pagerank to flow.

Currently the only way to make your clickable areas functional and Google friendly is this way below:

widget

I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question.

If I have an internal link in a div like

widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget

John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled.

Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as

widget

Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended?

Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this.

Thanks