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I havent noticed any difference between the two, but I might have been lucky so far!
Tony
Of course I can't say for a fact that they get special treatment, my hope would be Google places extra weight on structural HTML vs. presentational.
There does seem to be some anecdotal evidence to support this.
Tony
H1 tags in themselves don't lend any kind of credence or relevance to any particular topic. H1 tags don't contribute to relevance.
I'm not sure why a google engineer would say, "Hey, we gotta give these H1 Taggers a lift! These H1 tag web sites are so full of great content!" I can't see that at all.
There's a possibility that they may give it emphasis every once in awhile, like once a year or something, to randomize the algo. Anything's possible, you know. Just my opinion, but it seems logical and reasonable.
I don't know if Google use H1 elements for scoring but it does make sense to mark a page up according to its structure, IMO.
I am actually in the process of revising a client site to include H1 tags to improve search engine performance. We're doing other stuff as well, but that is part of the effort.
Therefore H1 text would be weighted more heavily if the rest of the page's text is smaller, but no benefit would be gained from a page where all on page text was H1.
<H1 "title=dog bones">DOG BONES</H1>
Having said that, my guess is that ciml is right, and that document structure is taken into account. Every optimizer knows that the TITLE tag is important, but that does not prevent Google from giving it lots of weight.
nell suggested:
include "title=" in your H tags.
<H1 "title=dog bones">DOG BONES</H1>
While W3.org [w3.org] does indeed show that the title element is supported in H1 tags, would you really want the above example to come under the scrutiny of a hand check by a Google rep?
Am I not recognizing some potential benefit to the end user in repeating the exact same phrase in the title element?
I think that many would perceive that as keyword stuffing.
Something along the lines of a page = "1" and the value of a word is 1/the number of words.
As said, if a <h1> is present, then it's more likely that these words should be emphasised more.
Perhaps if <h1>'s are emphasised more on a page, then something else on the page weighs less IMHO (guess)
Pros:
+ less code (faster page download)
+ easier to maintain (use css for styling)
+ "right" way to do things
+ *possible* benefit to relevance
Cons
-?
BoL:
> Perhaps if <h1>'s are emphasised more on a page, then something else on the page weighs less IMHO (guess)
Personally, I'm a fan of that kind of reasoning. PageRank assesses the importance of a document, but it makes more sense to measure the relevance of words within a document relatively.
I strongly agree with ciml on this one. Page structure is very important. The sequence of elements and the use of proper presentational markup does have its benefits! ;)
I will consider everything said in this thread tonight and decide what to do tommorrow. Right now it's getting late and there is a certain young lady who needs bathing. She's 14 weeks old and will make a great SEO one day!
Tony
Of course this is just speculation, but it is my humble opinion that you are looking at just the trees and not the entire forest.
I would say with some certainty(based on my own experience, and what I've read) that G does indeed use h1 tags in the algo.....but a better question i think would be.....
"How does the relevance and structure of the h1 tag effect other variables in the overall equation of the pages served for a given keyword phrase?"
would you really want the above example to come under the scrutiny of a hand check by a Google rep
Oh, my God no! I would fear being banned forever because I used this for a tool tip over a heading.
[edited by: nell at 8:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 13, 2002]
<h1><font size="3">widgets</font></h1>
I'm sure that the fine people over at Google have picked up on the fact we can abuse the system and format H1 tags to look like regular paragraph text. If so, it stands to reason that there would be no added value placed on heading tags of any shape or form.
a minefield of knowledge!
Just because a few may abuse something does not mean it would necessarily be discounted, cost vs benefit. My guess is that an H1,H2 tag has only a small influence over the results, no one is going to rocket to the top by abusing it, so general usefulness more important. Would it help the serps for the majority of pages to give heading tags more weight than p tags? Yes.
This is not solely about Google or ranking higher because you use them. Its about presentational markup and how pages are structured and what works best for both the user and the indexing spiders.
>>I haven't done any personal testing to verify this, but some believe that weight is assigned based on relative size.
I doubt that it is relative. In order to do that, they would need to download and parse external style sheets. Otherwise, they wouldn't have any way of determining the relative size of a heading tags for a substantial chunk of their database.
Two of them used H1 headers at the top of the page and the other used font size=4 to create the same effect as headers.
Maybe I got it wrong but it sure looked as though those factors made a difference.
<h1> tags are for the main page header...the header covering the subject of the page...on a well produced page this is the MOST important text anywhere in the body...I am certain that Google weights it accordingly...I'm also prety certain that <h2> tags also add some weight
but there's more to it than feeding the bots...a text to speech browser can be used to skip from heading to heading...so the <h> tags should be used properly to facilitate that...on its own it is sufficient reason
Oh, my God no! I would fear being banned forever because I used this for a tool tip over a heading.
Let me ask again then, based on the example you gave above... what possible benefit to an end user would a tool tip that is identical to the on page header be?
I can understand if perhaps it expanded on the on page text, but if it's identical, how is it anything but keyword stuffing?
"For instance, visual browsers frequently display the title as a "tool tip" (a short message that appears when the pointing device pauses over an object). Audio user agents may speak the title information in a similar context.
There are seven main attributes that you can assign to the <h> tag.
7.5.5 Headings: The H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 elements [w3.org]
My goal when designing is to avoid as many inline attributes that I can and move them to an external style sheet. I want html in its simplest form whenever possible.
[edited by: pageoneresults at 6:19 am (utc) on Nov. 14, 2002]
"For instance, visual browsers frequently display the title as a "tool tip" (a short message that appears when the pointing device pauses over an object). Audio user agents may speak the title information in a similar context.
<title="Dog bows for pit bull puppies"</title>
<h1 title="dog bows">Sweet, Snappy and Sassy</h1>
<img src="mindy_puppies.jpg" height="200" width="150" border="0" alt="pit bull puppies wearing bows">
That H1 wouldn't be too useful for some people without the title attribute, it all looks too logical to be headed for problems.
