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I had an argument with my coworker about this. So, in the article page there is no space to put H1 and then IT teams decided to hide H1. I personally think that H1 is not necessary in this case. Because it's not visible to users and doesn't make any powerful impact to SEO performance.
I'd like to know the best practice in this case. Thanks in advance!
I believe the H tags has or is morphing into a semantic tag question. Search engines don't automatically give a benefit for using H tags as in the past ... they care about what visually should be the H tag and use that instead! But they do care about semantic usage, which is why they look but verify, and reward those who they choose.
The H1-H6 tags are the original semantic tags used to create an outline of the content. They are used by screen readers for people who have difficulty in reading the content or in some cases may prefer to have the page read to them.
The best practice is one H1 tag with the idea of two having been considered. Many sites want to have their company name and the page title in H1; reasonable people don't see a problem with that.
In the good old days using H tags for keywords worked well, but now that the robot can render the page and determines what is important by design factors such as which content is actually the most predominant ... and it the good old days method does not work. [see note below]
While the H tags no longer work as they did in the good old days. Search Engines do pay a lot of attention to usability, including if the text is large enough to read or if links are to close together for usage on a cell phone.
If there were no advantage today, (although i say if, many have evidence of an advantage [note below]), to making a site that worked well for more people the chances are high that in the future it will. So evergreen content should use these tags. It is the direction the search engines are trending towards.
For any vertical in the Search Engines algos are being applied differently. Some sites are ranking because of fresh content algo while others are ranking because of YMYL, (your moneny your life), historic authority content. You know those http not https sites that still show up, they don't need H tags.
Some people may see a significant change and others nothing for the same type of change to their content. I can literally rank any content on a YMYL site, but don't because too much to lose. On that site H tags have zero effect. On another site it almost does not show and H tags are important.
Since the effect is not consistent people are expressing what they have seen. I advice to consider where the trends are heading, the algos are trending towards better readability and if the H tags don't express this it is best not to use them ... if they express it then it is best to use them.
So, in the article page there is no space to put H1 and then IT teams decided to hide H1. Because it's not visible to users and doesn't make any powerful impact to SEO performance.
Hidden content can be identified by Google as spam - Hidden text and links and this means that your hidden H1 can have a negative effect.
The H1 element is one of the heading elements with the help of which a hierarchical structure of the content of an HTML document is created. The content of the H1 element has the highest level, which means that this content is the most important thing in the document. Each document, including an HTML document, can have only one content subject. The content subject briefly represents the topic of the content, so it can be defined as the most important part of the content. Thus the subject may be the content (or part of the content) of the H1 element.
By refusing the H1 element, you simultaneously renounce the representation of the hierarchical structure of the HTML document and the explicit representation of the subject of the content. In addition, the content element H1 Google can use to create title links in SERP:
Google Search uses the following sources to automatically determine title links:
Content in
<title>elementsMain visual title or headline shown on a page
Heading elements, such as
<h1>elements
Check Google's recommendations:
Use heading tags to emphasize important text
Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.
<h1>that does fit?