entire text on index page is <H1>

I was trying to figure out how a competitor was ranking

[LateNight]

I have a competitor that has 1st page results on a term I have been trying to reach for a long time. We have similiar PageRank, keyword density etc and I could not figure out how he did it. I took a closer look and noticed his entire page is within <h1> tags - anyone heard of this tactic? This tactic seems to work - will it be penalized or is it perfectly sound.

[Bradley]

think long-term...........don't do it.

[Mohamed_E]

will it be penalized or is it perfectly sound.

I do not know whether or not it will be penalized, but it is emphatically not "perfectly sound".

Google's Quality Guidelines - Basic principles [google.com] state clearly:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
  
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Putting the whole page in h1 tags clearly violates both of these guidelines.

<edit>Attempted to fix missing </quote> :( </edit>

[edited by: Mohamed_E at 3:09 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2003]

[jdancing]

Isn't making pages for search engines that are readable by humans what the best SEOs do for a living?