h1 and h2 content

Using same h1 on multiple pages

[roodle]

Hi,

I have several sites where <h1> content is the same for a whole section of the site, and I use h2 content to differentiate the pages, e.g.

<h1>General Section Title with Keyword1 and Keyword2</h1> 
<h2>Keyword3, Keyword4 and Keyword5 in Title</h2> 

...where Keyword4 and Keyword5 are different on each page although of equal importance amongst themselves, and Keyword1, Keyword2 and Keyword3 are always the same.

I'm wondering whether this is good practice and what other people's opinions/experiences are on this. I also read (somewhere) that h2 content has more weighting in Google(?) or is that information out of date?

[tedster]

Google is always testing the "signals of relevance" that are present on a page - and they test across many pages to see what signals offer a dependable signal for them to use.

It was true, maybe five years back or so, that the H1 tag was widely abused. At that time the H1 element was not dependable as a relevance signal - not even to the degree the H2 was. People were just wrapping around keywords and phrases willy-nilly, hoping it would help their page rank for those words like some kind of magic bullet.

So, for a period, Google appropriately downgraded the importance of the H1 element in their algorithm. I don't think that has been the case for quite a while. First, because the algorithm has improved, and second, because H1 abuse "didn't work" anymore, the heavy misuse seems to have declined.

The H1 tag should hold a description of the topic for the page where it appears. Then H2 is a sub-topic and so on. Having identical H1 tags on several pages is not a good practice, IMO. It sends a confusing signal that blurs the informational structure for that section of the site. It can even cause pages to be clustered inappropriately and be filtered out of search results.

Sometimes there is a need for a section label - some cue for your readers that remains consistent across many documents, or a "pre-head" if you will. I often create something like this, but I do not use an H tag to do it. instead I just use an appropriately styled text block that appears first on the page, before the true H1, which as I said is unique to each page.

The key is to remember that, academically, HTML assumes that before the page came into being there was a document. Then HTML is used to "mark up" that document and to highlight it's semantic structure -- not it's layout. Rendering information is supposed to be the job of CSS, not HTML.

If your pages are well structured semanically, then you are giving search engines a lot of useful relevance signals - and that helps them return your urls in the most appropriate search results.

[roodle]

Having identical H1 tags on several pages is not a good practice, IMO.

Thanks for your reply tedster. I've noted the "IMO" and am wondering whether this is purely opinion about creating a better informational structure or whether it's genuinely detrimental to ranking in Google. If I imagine myself writing the pages in question as simple text documents I might well do the same as I have in the HTML version. Even though my decision to repeat the main heading on various pages may not necessarily be the most logical, it probably wouldn't affect how the reader understands what the document is about. In any case I appreciate your perspective and it's given me food for thought.

Any other opinions/evidence out there?

[contentwithcontent]

I think there are often reasons to have the same H1, if it is appropriate. On my much Google loved website there are the exact same H1 tags for each page.
This is not due to any trickery, it is due to the reality that every page of my site does have the same overall important theme. This is represented in my H1's.

[edited by: tedster at 4:18 pm (utc) on April 25, 2007]