11
votes
Accepted
Do heading tags out of order penalise SEO?
No, in all likelihood this will have zero impact on your SEO.
While it does offer some benefits in terms of accessibility (because it helps the screen readers), the order of your headings doesn't ...
- 1,319
9
votes
Accepted
Rankings plummeted when I changed H1 tags to match the title, can I recover my rankings by reversing the changes?
Your h1 is likely not the culprit, but let's find out
First of all, I'd wait about 2 weeks before doing anything. Google just finished rolling out their November spam update. SERPs are a bit volatile ...
- 6,569
7
votes
Can I use numbering to decorate headings for readability in CSS without hurting SEO?
Contrary to hurting SEO, I've found that placing numbers next to headings can help SEO in some cases.
More specifically, if you have a numbered list of things, sometimes it can qualify your site for ...
- 16.4k
5
votes
Accepted
SEO - Keyword in all headings | penalty?
One line answer: Do not think too much about keywords vs heading tags. Create content which will be useful for the user.
Meaning:
You can have h1, few h2 and so on. But don't think too much as you ...
- 3,173
5
votes
Is it SEO friendly to step directly from h3 to h5?
HTML provides semantic markup to a document. CSS provides information about the presentation. Choosing to use a H5 because of the styling it offers is the wrong reason to use. The only reason why ...
- 86.4k
4
votes
Does having a <span> tag around a portion of a word hurt SEO?
Using a span like that does not hurt SEO, however there is no reason to do it when the ::first-letter pseudoelement exists. You can do the following to style just the first letter without messing with ...
- 16.4k
4
votes
Can I use numbering to decorate headings for readability in CSS without hurting SEO?
The featured snippet in Google that Maximillian posted is a good example of where I would use numbered headings. Quick how-to guides, recipes, ranking, anything where the order of events actually ...
- 616
3
votes
Are <p> tags important inside the <article> tag for SEO?
A <p> tag is specifically for a paragraph. If you are creating a section of a page, use a container tag, such as <article>, <div>, or <section>.
And, FYI, you can put whatever ...
- 2,297
3
votes
Accepted
What are the practical benefits of having just one <h1> per page
You didn't state who makes the recommendation but the specification itself says no such thing. A heading begins sectioning content and there may be more than one sectioning content on a page. However, ...
- 4,639
3
votes
Anchor tag inside <h1> or <h1> inside anchor tag: which is better?
What's said here's is insightfull, thank you all. Let's take it up one more notch: adding microdata and such into the equation.
Let's say we've got
<h1 itemprop="name"><a href="http://...
3
votes
Are <p> tags important inside the <article> tag for SEO?
Think of writing a paper. Your paper would be one topic with subtopics. You would have headers and paragraphs. Headers define a subtopic of the papers topic and precede the paragraphs that cover the ...
- 32.9k
3
votes
SEO tools say no <h1>, <h2>, etc. when they are loaded by AJAX. Is that a problem for Google?
Today Google can Crawl your AJAXed content
Today, as long as you're not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, we are generally able to render and understand your web pages ...
- 1,050
3
votes
Accepted
H1 tag word with two styles
Search engines should understand it as a h1 level heading: Something different.
Use of the <span> element in this example would appear to be proper.
The HTML <span> element is a ...
- 3,443
3
votes
Accepted
Since there is no H title on the website consisting of images, is it possible to add H title as display:none?
It might be more of a problem of hiding headers than having none. This gives me the same feeling as black hat tactics. You would rather not have the signal than fake signals and potentially tanking ...
- 1,215
2
votes
Same text for <h1> and <h2>
This does come off as keyword stuffing.
Think about heading tags as a table of contents for the rest of the content on the page. When stripping away all other informations on the page. Your headings ...
- 108
2
votes
Is it SEO friendly to step directly from h3 to h5?
It shouldn't matter much.
From the coding side, it's good to be in order and consistent but shouldn't impact SEO h3 vs h5.
These days usability also plays an important role in SEO.
So, have a ...
- 3,173
2
votes
Do heading tags out of order penalise SEO?
There is no requirement that heading tags be sequential. You can intermix use of h1 through h6. as meets the syntactic (or display) needs of your site at will. The use of the numbers simply sets ...
- 259
2
votes
Does using too many heading tags (h1s, h2s, and h3s) cause SEO problems?
On my perspective, I don't think Google imposes a strict rules on the number of heading tags to use in a page. There are also websites that use heading tags (h2/h3) for subheadings on longer content - ...
- 482
2
votes
Does a subtitle below the main H1 help SEO?
Depends on your content. Does/Would a subtitle help clarify or build on the title for visitors? Does it bring a call to action?
If the subtitles help bring structure and enhance the content, sure.
...
- 121
2
votes
Accepted
Can hidden lines in heading tags and content sections help SEO?
Absolutely not, on the contrary, you could be penalized by cloaking.
Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the
content presented to the search engine spider is ...
- 3,807
2
votes
Accepted
Does having a <span> tag around a portion of a word hurt SEO?
Yes, this is ok and Search engines would see the text as "Hello".
Reason: Drop caps, Websites likes NYC.com uses drop caps, drop caps needs special CSS codes without div, span or class drop caps are ...
- 201
2
votes
In terms of SEO, what are the implications if you mix h1, h2, etc with role="heading"?
According to the Mozilla website, about the «ARIA: heading role»:
The best way to use this role is to not use it at all, and instead use the native heading tags through as shown in the example ...
- 343
1
vote
How does google treat h1-3's that are styled to be smaller than a lower class of heading?
Will Google render that page and treat the h2 as the true h1 for the page?
Both, Yes and No.
Google fetches the HTML of your page and then analyzes it in different ways. Google examines one or more ...
- 32.9k
1
vote
How does google treat h1-3's that are styled to be smaller than a lower class of heading?
AFAIK, Google relies on H1, H2, etc only, and not on how these styles look like. Your H1 will be the main title for Google, not your H2.
- 231
1
vote
For SEO can a paragraph contain headings rather than using headings above paragraphs?
Google doesn't care much about what tags you use these days. Historically Google put extra weight on words in header tags because Googlebot only looked at the source code of the page and could pick ...
- 99.4k
1
vote
Does using <h3> for subheader directly under <h1> page title impact SEO performance?
For SEO, it doesn't matter if you skip one or more heading levels. It does matter that the structure makes sense semantically, and that your more important text is higher up in that hierarchy. It also ...
- 5,256
1
vote
What is less bad for SEO: to have a <section> with no heading, or to hide the heading with CSS?
Hiding content is quite dodgy. I would avoid this where possible. Save the hiding and showing for interactive elements.
I would title the page appropriately with a H1, then each section I would ...
- 347
1
vote
Can hidden lines in heading tags and content sections help SEO?
Google does not 'score code' it scores rendered content and placement, little to no weight is assigned to 'styling' because 'design' is subjective, you do not need a word to be in bold or underline ...
- 33.1k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible