Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Just wondering if Google gives the same weight to a CSS class name as it does to a H1 ie.
<p class="p_Heading1"><span class="f_Heading1">Blue Widgets</span></p>
as apposed to
<h1> Blue Widgets</h1>
What is the recommended way if you had to use CSS? Would google see that this is the primary heading?
Thanks.
Xraps
The HTML elements: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, forms, convey meaning to search engines as they try to understand the importance and relationship of all of the parts of your content.
If you need to style the heading just use the h1 selector to do that, or give the heading a class name and style that class.
[edited by: g1smd at 11:58 pm (utc) on Sep. 28, 2008]
The reason is I have a help file with some great information in it which we wish to webarise. The program we use to create the help file has a default HTML output, but its output far from clean.
We want the pages to be as Google friendly as possible so we are starting to rewrite the way the application does the generation. The H1 issue is one of the harder ones to fix, but I think it would be worth the time spent getting it right now.
Regards,
Xraps
The op, you type faster than I do.
Otherwise of who? Me or OP?
The purpose of Google is to not reward SEO tricks, and the use of "H" elements seems more like an SEO trick than a legitimate design practice.
I would think that missing <h> tags would be a flag of auto-generated content.
Huh?
Headings are a core part of the HTML specification. Content is is supposed to be Marked up (that's the M of HTML by the way) as headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and forms. That's the whole basis of HTML.
There's no trick, only those that would seek to stuff all their content into headings in some belief that that stupid "trick" would score the content higher.
A heading sits above, and introduces, the following paragraph, list, table or form, or several of those.
Why else would the W3C, of all people, have several articles about the correct usage of headings, and why would their HTML validator include an option to check the nesting and priority of your headings for you if it wasn't important?
Heck, W3C even have a semantic data extractor tool that parses headings and extracts data.
What if this practice was used site wide?
The reason I ask is because I 'adopted' 2 websites where the developer implemented that practice. It just so happened that one of the sites dropped completely off the radar for the keyword that was in the behind-the-scenes heading tag (pretty much site wide) and I was wondering if that could be the explanation. The site still holds positions for other keywords, other than the one in the H tag appearing across the site.
At minimum, I realize it is not using the H tag as intended, at maximum, it is 'deceptive' and might warrant a penalty. What do you think?
Thanks,
Greg
At minimum, I realize it is not using the H tag as intended, at maximum, it is 'deceptive' and might warrant a penalty. What do you think?
I think you're right. There was a period of time about 6 years ago where the H1 tag was abused so widely that it became too noisy a relevance signal for Google to rely on. At that time, the H1 element counted the same as any other text - but the H2 tag still had some pop!
Google's algorithm has become much more sophisticated today. Properly used H1 tags can apparently be a good relevance signal. But misused or abused H1 tags are detected and ignored or even worse. I've seen sites put their Home link with an extra keyword inside an H1 tag sitewide - and then go missing in the SERPs for that keyword.
Does the H2 tag have good value with Google?
-- Me, 2002.
Interestingly, the site popped from #18 for months/years to #4 - 7 for a 3 week period for THE biggest keyword (which happened to be the one in the H2), and then completely gone. Now the page (homepage) is not in the Top 1,000, although it is 2nd/3rd page for the singular version of the keyword.
Thanks for the feedback guys. Looks like I have some re-coding to do.
Thanks,
Greg
The H1 and H2 tags has BR's inside to split the text (about 12 words in H1, about 25 in H2) into smaller lines to fit a small-ish niche in the site's header.
In order to colour the first line differently, to give more visual emphasis to it, I'd wrapped the first line in a span. The page that did "well" in google did not have a header, so no h1 tag, no span.
I've now removed the span. Hopefully this will boost the site back up the charts. If that IS the reason for failure then it seems odd, since span is usually allowed in block containers.
Does anyone know if BR in an H tag could cause a similar problem?
If it makes a difference it's using DocType HTML 4.01 Transitional.
Does anyone know if BR in an H tag could cause a similar problem?
No, it doesn't. It gets indexed much like any word separator - space, dash, etc.
