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What is the best and easiest way to provide something like the H1 tag but in a way that it doesn't affect google rankings? Our homepage sometimes is used for advertisement, this should be in the H1 which is normally used for the default content that describes the company.

But we don't want that search engines list us with these ads. Do we have to replace the H1 with something else, for example CSS with big font and bold or is there another way to avoid it?

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    I would definitely go the "use css" route as you mentioned. – Maximillian Laumeister Jul 9 '20 at 19:57
  • Yeah, use CSS for that goal. – Bhargav Joshi Jul 11 '20 at 1:31
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Google doesn't care much about what tags you use these days. It cares more about how the page looks to users. Googlebot now renders the page. It will treat any large prominent text the same as it used to treat H1 tags. It won't change your SEO to use an H1 vs using some other tag and styling it to look like an H1.

To prevent Googlebot from seeing an ad on your page, you should write it into the page from a separate file and use robots.txt to block Googlebot from crawling that URL. See Preventing robots from crawling specific part of a page for full details.

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  • Thanks. I didn't know that google now treats H1 tags same as content that is displayed same as H1 Tags. However, we changed it already and the customer(which was worrying about that) is happy ;-) Do you have a reference for this? – Tim Schmelter Aug 10 '20 at 12:08
  • Is there a way to tell google to ignore this prominent text which is shown either in a H1 tag or displayed in a similar way with CSS? There's no link url which should be blocked because it's not really an ad, but it's content that is just temporary on the homepage to lead the visitors to some special (own) product/site. – Tim Schmelter Aug 10 '20 at 12:12
  • There is no way to tell Googlebot to ignore text with CSS. You can use JavaScript combined with robots.txt to do so, even when there is no link to block. See Preventing robots from crawling specific part of a page – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Aug 10 '20 at 12:19
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I can't give an answer without look at the site, but if this is only on the homepage, then you shouldn't worry because this should only be your brand keywords - then H1 doesn't hold so much value from ranking. what matter is the overall content of your page.

Hope this helps

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