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.
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
-
Will links be counted?
We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers. The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
Using the same domain for two websites (for different geographical locations)
Hi all, My client has a new E-commerce site coming out in few months.
Technical SEO | | skifr
His requirement is to use the same domain (lets call it www.domain.com for now) for two seperate websites:
The first site, for users with ip addresses from USA - which will include prices in US dollars.
The second site - for users outside of the US - will not include any prices, and will have different pages and design. Now, lets say that googlebot crawls the websites from different ip ranges. How can i make sure a user from France, for example, won't see crawled pages from the US? Sure, once he will click the result, I can redirect him to a "Sorry, but this content is unavailable in your country" page. The problem is, I don't want a user from France to see the in the search results the meta description snippets of pages related only to users in the US (in some cases, the snippets may include the prices in $).
Is Geotargeting through Webmaster Tools can help in this case? I know I can target a part of the website for a specific country (e.g. - www.domain.com/us/), but how can I make sure global users won't see the pages targeted only to the US in the search results? Thanks in Advance0 -
Blog separate from Website
One of my clients has a well established website, and a well established blog - each with its own domain. Is there any way to move the blog to his website domain without losing the SEO and links that he has built up over time?
Technical SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Only my website homepage is appearing in search and the other indvidual pages are not coming up?This happened after the website revamp
We have revamped our website http://www.wsinetpower.com/ after te revamp the SEO rankings went down and the inner pages are not appearing in serach. What could be the reason
Technical SEO | | Muna0 -
Searching in Google using the Site:www.example.com specification - is it in an order?
Hi Gurus, Just a quick searching question. If you do a Google search using the site: specification eg. site:www.example.com Is the list returned by Google in an order of something similar to 'Page Authority' or some other order eg. page first seen date etc. Because you are looking at your single site, is Google listing your pages back to you in it's perceived order of current 'popularity'? Thanks, Brad
Technical SEO | | BM70 -
How to use rel canonical?
Hi, I am having some questions about this and I think you can help me on this. Here I have the example of my problem: pagination: Suppose that I have a new with 2 pages http://www.espectador.com/noticias/208907/fernando-pereira-encuesta-de-cifra-prendio-una-lucecita-amarilla-en-el-pit-cnt you can access the first page by different ways: www.espectador.com/1v4_contenido.php?m=&id=250419&ipag=1 http://www.espectador.com/1v4_contenido.php?m=&id=250419 http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250419/alvaro-vega-fa-creo-que-cosmo-fue-usada-por-bqb-para-evitar-una-subasta-a-la-baja-y-asi-quedar-con-las-manos-libres Same meta descr, same body with different URLs. Can I use rel canonical in the file 1v4_contenido.php that point to the friendly url? <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250419/alvaro-vega-fa-creo-que-cosmo-fue-usada-por-bqb-para-evitar-una-subasta-a-la-baja-y-asi-quedar-con-las-manos-libres](view-source:http://www.espectador.com/noticias/250419/alvaro-vega-fa-quotcreo-que-cosmo-fue-usada-por-bqb-para-evitar-una-subasta-a-la-bajaquot-y-asi-quotquedar-con-las-manos-libresquot)"/> do I have a loop here? The rel canonical can goes in the page 1? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Technical question about site structure using a CMS, redirects, and canonical tag
I have a couple of sites using a particular CMS that creates all of the pages under a content folder, including the home page. So the url is www.example.com/content/default.asp. There is a default.asp in the root directory that redirects to the default page in the content folder using a response.redirect statement and it’s considered a 302 redirect. So all incoming urls, i.e. www.example.com and example.com and www.example.com/ will go to the default.asp which then redirects to www.example.com/ content/default.asp. How does this affect SEO? Should the redirect be a 301? And whether it’s a 301 or a 302, can we have a rel=canonical tag on the page that that is rel=www.example.com? Or does that create some sort of loop? I’ve inherited several sites that use this CMS and need to figure out the best way to handle it.
Technical SEO | | CHutchins1 -
Why is my website banned?
IMy website is Costume Machine at www.costumemachine.com . My site has been banned for 1 year now. I have requested that google reconsider my site 3 times without luck. The site is dynamic and basically pulls in feeds from affiliate sites. We have added over 1,500 pages of original content. The site has been running great since 2008 without any penalties. I don't think I got hit with any linking penalty. I cleaned up all questionable links last November when the penalty hit. Am I being hit with a "thin" site penalty? If that is the issue what is the best way to fix the problem?
Technical SEO | | tadden0