Header Tag Dilution

h1 tags

[dchamp]

Hello all, I am working with this one client and they have a visible h1 on the index page. (good thing!) However, they have included CSS styles and attributes within the header tag...

i.e. <h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 30px; color:White; font-size:24px;">TextText</h1>

I think the value is diluted. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks,
D

[MarkFilipak]

I assume that the index.html is just for crawlers.

"White" should be all lowercase.

What do you mean by "diluted"?

[dchamp]

the value(importance) of the h1 tag is diminished because of the css style within the actual tag

[MarkFilipak]

To answer your question, the style properties of an element are initialized by the user agent (UA - the browser) to a set of default property values for that element (which are underspecified in the CSS spec.) Any style property can be overloaded during the cascade -- please see the CSS spec. for a description of the cascade. You can characterize this as diluting the style, but the proper term is overloading. This is an important topic. For example, I do not rely on any particular default for any of the various style properties for any of the various HTML elements. What do I do? I overload all of them from the git-go. Thus, I assure cross-browser consistency.

[g1smd]

Put the style in an external style sheet. Unclutter your HTML.

By the way, it is a "heading" not a "header".

[swa66]

If you look at the <h1> with a style attribute from a SEO perspective, ... I'd be suspicious of the white color (not knowing the background color it is on). If it's white on white, I'd presume a search engine finding that out might penalize you heavily.

CSS is today mostly ignored by spiders (and external CSS are typically not even touched at all), but such things can change or can be evaluated manually regardless.

If you drop table layout n favor of CSS, you should see a decrease of the total size of the html (significant decrease), and that would yield nothing but good (keyword density, simplicity to parse, load time, ...).

But SEO isn't the main driver to get CSS.

[penders]

the value(importance) of the h1 tag is diminished because of the css style within the actual tag

By value I assume you mean "TextText" in your initial example. Therefore I fail to see how any style on this element can have any effect on the importance of the value itself, in terms of search engines, if that is what you mean? I don't think the OP is refering to 'diluting the style'? (IMHO)

However, it is technically possible that if an intelligent robot could determine that your 'white' heading was on a 'white' background (ie. not visible to those viewing the page) then it could be considered as trying to spam your keywords and have a detrimental in the SERPs - IMHO.

(EDIT: I should refresh the page - I see swa66 got there before me! :)

[dchamp]

Thanks all...I never got these replies via my email. I really appreciate it!