A logical usage of heading tags and SEO

Question

I have a dynamic school website (feed from a database), and I have it structured with different sections, for example.

• Sports
• Academic life
• Our students

At first sight, it is pretty obvious that I could name the "Sports" section with a good nice h1 tag with the word "Sports".

But as it is feed by articles by ID, something like articles.php?=134 _{(don't worry about the rewrite mode for now)} the same Heading 1 tag repeats over and over, and I could get penalized.

Now it is more obvious to use the actual title of the article as h1, for example, "Team 1 won over Team 2 on the summer event"

But now I have a new problem. The word "sports" is not used anymore, and this is a waste because we have several articles about sports. I want to use the word Sports, like the "good old paper newspapers" used to identify the sections.

What would be good practice for headings like this, considering SEO and actually identifying the section? A simple meaningless div, just for aesthetic purposes? A lower ranking heading? Stick to an h1 tag?

_{Image from pixabay.com}

Answer 1

Headings (H1, H2, etc) play no part in ranking a website and having duplicate ones won't get you penalized - Google uses them to understand the content and how it is organized in the page, so having unique headings means it's an opportunity to make your content clearer to Google, which in turn can help you (but again, it won't get you penalized).

On your particular case, how having the word "Sport" help the visitor? Isn't "Team 1 won over Team 2 on the summer event" much more helpful - and descriptive of the actual content?

I would use the actual title of the article and maybe create a section called /sports to host these articles there (like a tagging system), this way you get the best of both situations.