From SEO point of view is hiding H1 in this case bad for indexing?

Question

I'm having to use a 3rd party CMS and I cannot change the contents of the h3 (or the h3 itself)

I've not had too much dealing with "cufon" - presume its an old fashioned way of using a specific font. I'm guessing it's not legit HTML so not indexed.

Therefore I wanted to include the page's header in an H1

<h3>
  <span class="someClassDictatingTheFontToUse">
    <cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Alternative text " style="..inline styles..">
   <canvas width="73" height="18" style="..inline styles.."></canvas>
     <cufontext>Page </cufontext></cufon><cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Page" style="..inline styles..">
     <canvas width="76" height="18" style="..inline styles.."></canvas>
     <cufontext>Content</cufontext>
   </cufon>
  </span>
</h3>

<!-- im proposing this -->
<h1 class="offthepage_or_verysmall">Page Content</h1>

<p>This is my content etc</p>

where

.offthepage { margin-left:-10000px; position:absolute}

or

.verysmall { height:1px, position:absolute; left:1px; etc }

Would the page be penalised (from SE indexing perspective) for that?

or is there a more robust / SE friendly way of doing it without it being consider keyword stuffing?

thanks

Answer 1

This is serving content only to search engines and specifically for the purpose of manipulating your search rankings. This is classic black hat SEO and, if you get caught, result in penalties up to and possibly including having your site removed from Google's index.

Ideally you can put an alternative in there as a fallback for non-javascript users like search engines. I would expect <noscript> to work in this situation (but I don;t know for sure):

<h3>
  <span class="someClassDictatingTheFontToUse">
    <cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Alternative text " style="..inline styles..">
   <canvas width="73" height="18" style="..inline styles.."></canvas>
     <cufontext>Page </cufontext></cufon><cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Page" style="..inline styles..">
     <canvas width="76" height="18" style="..inline styles.."></canvas>
     <cufontext>Content</cufontext>
   </cufon>
  </span>
  <noscript>
    Content
  </noscript>
</h3>

FYI, Cufon was an old way to get non-standard fonts on a web page cross-browser. It's obsolete now. The new way to do it is @font-face.