Is it safe to use multiple h2 tags for a list of products?

Question

I am using html5.

I have a list of products in my store (132 products), and they are currently being displayed using pagination, with 10 results on each page.

All my product names are very keyword rich and I want to get all that long tail traffic, but how do I assign them importance (using header tags) without getting penalized?

For example, if I use <h2> for my product names (they are not links, just plain text), then the bots will see 132 <h2> tags, and I think this may be a problem.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You should use whatever is appropriate semantically. If they are all headings at a secondary level, use h2. Search engines index pages so they don't see "132 headings" they see 10 for each page.

As long as there is some content between each h2 then you are fine.

Answer 2

If you show product title, price, short description, and image (etc.) for each product in the product listing, you should use headings (resp. sectioning elements).

Each product should be an separate article element. They are grouped in a section. Because both elements are sectioning element, they have an implicit, unspecified heading anyhow (for the outline). Providing explicit headings for each product makes sense for users, bots, accessibility, SEO, document outline, etc.

<section>

  <h1>Page 3 of 14</h1>

  <article>
    <h1>Product Foo</h1>
    <p>…</p>
  </article>

  <article>
    <h1>Product Bar</h1>
    <p>…</p>
  </article>

  <article>
    <h1>Product Foobar</h1>
    <p>…</p>
  </article>

  <nav>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="/page/2" rel="prev">Previous page</a></li>
      <li><a href="/page/4" rel="next">Next page</a></li>
    </ul>
  </nav>

</section>

You could use h1 for each sectioning element, or you could use h1-h6 (according to the calculated outline). Which you choose doesn't matter semantically.

Answer 3

I think 132 H2's is defiantly an over kill, i think what would be better is to have the text being tags to the relevant pages. This way you'll have internal anchor tags going to the pages in question there for bolstering there importance in terms of internal linking aswell as having good relevant long tail anchor text to each page.

I think from a ui point of view people would expect to click on the items title to go to the item.

This is also the approach that amazon takes.