Google Penalizing for <H1> tags?

My rankings went down when added

[Ameriman]

I actually watched my Google SE result go down after adding the <h1> tag...

Has anyone else experienced this?

Or can you confirmed it helped your SE result?

thanks....

[reseller]

stinkfoot

>>Google has seriously had it day as a search engine imo<<

The CLASSIC Google that we used to is just no more there since Feb. 2005 or before as my good WWW friend Dayo_UK prefer to put it ;-)

What we have been dealing with since is the NEW Google, which is still great, IF we understand how it function and adopt!

The real problem is that we continue to "play" according to out-dated rules including <H1> and more.

[stinkfoot]

<beaming smile>

Ok .. takeing your persective reseller .. google is nice

</beaming smile>
<worried look>
Now I have 11 sites and 20000 pages all with H1 tags .. do i just go and delete them? Do I rewrite every pages content? Oh yes .. great if i do that i get penalised for "gaming google"

erm ... nope sorry thats another 5 years work and the funds wont run to it.

many years of work not "playing" anything apart from common sence page is about widgets so widgets as a word goes in the title

<gripe>
sorry .. google sucks
</gripe>

[martinibuster]

Maybe it's not just the H1, but when you take all the off page/on page factors together, with the addition of the H1 your site suddenly fits the statistical profile of a website that is out to artificially influence the rankings.

[reseller]

stinkfoot

>>Now I have 11 sites and 20000 pages all with H1 tags .. do i just go and delete them? Do I rewrite every pages content? Oh yes .. great if i do that i get penalised for "gaming google"<<

IMHO, you just leave those gorgeous H1 alone ;-)

However, you may change the content between <H1> and </H1> for few pages a time if thats the ONLY change you wish to do on those few pages.

Maybe there is an "less than x% of a total pages of a site" of pages ( or a specific maximum number of pages) which we can change ONLY the <H1></H1> without triggering the Anti-SEO or "Gaming Google" filters.

[steveb]

"do i just go and delete them?"

Only if you are nuts. There is no reason to fear H1, and it won't get you in trouble, despite deliberately deceptive rants to the contrary.

Some people here like to say things like WHITE BACKGROUNDS GET YOU BARRED. It's nonsense. At the same time, if you use white text on a white background to make hidden text, of course you can get barred. If you stuff 1000 words in H1, of course that could get you in trouble.

There is nothing to fear in proper use of H1, and it continues to be a small aid in general, and a valuable one in long tail marketing. As it should. Search engines WANT helpful signals from web pages to show their relevance for more obscure searches.

What there is to "fear" is gaming the search engines. If you don't understand that combining sensible things with rule breaking things can make you rank higher and thus get you scrutinized more, well, duh. It's the gaming stuff that gets you in trouble, not proper html.

[stinkfoot]

Martinibuster .. hmmm worth thinking about

reseller ... change the content between <H1> and </H1>

This is what i was doing. With so much information changing and adding unique info will take several lifetimes. Professional writers were brought in to research the topics more thrououly and now 20 pages a week per site are being added and 1000 words of unique are being added to existing pages.

I find it difficult to think the people who have written this software believe that 20 pages a week is to much for a site. The top ranking sites are making 1/4 millionn dollars a year as a basic minimum. These sites are stale with nothing new.

What is a guy to do .. fire everyone? Become a one man band again like when I started out 16 years ago?

[stinkfoot]

ooops sorry forgot the <gripe> </gripe> tags on the last sentance :P