Forum Moderators: open
Q.1. Will sites be penalized for *wrapping* a keyword phrase and links in <h2></h2> tag?
>Penalized or banned?
Like this:
<h2>Widget
<a href="">xyz</a>
<a href="">abc</a>
<a href="">etc</a>
</h2>
<h2>
Zonkers
<a href="">123</a>
<a href="">www</a>
</h2>
>I've seen it done on one site.
Q. Will this cause penalties or getting a site banned?
Thanks for your help guys:)
frenzy77
There are a LOT of people at working on the various aspects of search. You might be surprised to note, for example, that a whole "section" is dedicated to understanding what "frame of mind" a user is in when they type in a specific sort of phrase (they aim to distinguish between a transactional query and a research query).
With so many people working on improving so many aspects of search, the algorithm is now way beyond one person being able to tell you what will happen to an individual page as the result of a specific keyword density of link structure (contrary to what we often read in forums!). Instead, the Google engineers seem to approach any aspect of their research and decision making with a common question - would this change make the Internet and the search a better experience for the user. They ALWAYS look at things from the user's perspective.
When you do this, your question loses its relevence to the search engine's engineers - The engineer couldn't tell you if this is better for the user or worse for the user than the previous page layout, because it depends on whether that is going to improve or depreciate the user experience on a statistically overwhelming percentage of cases.
In general, though, you are talking about two things, H tags and Linking. H tags are used to help a reader to see - say - the heading for a paragraph. This will help algorithms to put next section of text into context.
Links, on the other hand, help the user to navigate... usually to another page, and definitely away from the text. I think they are doing different things for the user. I would have to conclude that a link in an H2 tag would probably be linking the user to a definition of that phrase - so actually, I would consider the page you link to as more relevent for the phrase than the one you are writing. However, WITHOUT the hyperlink, I would assume the text under the H2 tag helps to define the text in the H2 tag.
Now - you are looking to confuse this logic. Three H2 links suggest that there is no text explaining each paragraph. This makes it harder for the search engine to understand what the page is bout. It will therefore use other ideas, link the anchor text on links INTO the page to gather more information on this score. However, with less accuracy on what the page is about, there is also less impact in the pages that you link to from the H2 tags, again because the search engine cannot decide, for sure, where your page fits in the greater scheme of things.
Are you improving the USER EXPERIENCE? If so, that's great, if not - then any advantage you get from this will be extremely small and probably short term.
