h1 versus large text

[mikeD]

I know this may have been discussed before but I can't find the thread. I have had h1 tags altered by css on all my pages as a main heading. But have lately noticed my ranking being hit and this is the only thing I think it could be. I have therefore changed to large text to combat this.

Would people suggest large text can work as well as h1.

[mikeD]

I did as a test take altered h2 and h3 tags off my homepage a week ago and the ranking of the page increased greatly. Do people think Google maybe penalising over optimization and SEO's techniques.

[tedster]

The H1 tag has been seriously (and stupidly) spammed. I doubt that Google or any engine can afford to "boost" the value of words just because they appear inside an H1 tag. However from what I see, the H2 tag, when used appropriately (that is, on a page with a single H1 element preceding it) still gets some extra clout.

Search engines are looking for relevance, and even though the H1 tag may be a poor indicator of relevance today, the H2 tag is still pretty good. Stupid people just don't "get" what H tags are all about. Use them properly and they can help make the topic of your page and the sub-topics of its sections very clear to an algo.

Now about the CSS issues. If you have your css declarations in an external file, how does any search engine know about them? Are you seeing .css files being regularly spidered? I'm not.

And why would search engines penalize for using css as intended? I would think that any boost you see is either a temporary effect (fresh listing) or due to some other changes. I HIGHLY doubt that Google wants to see browser default rendering of H1 text. Why would they care about aesthetic/visual issues at all?

Answering your thread title exactly, I think that today, large (or bold) text may even work better than H1 elements for optimization purposes. I think H1 text is weighted just about the same as any old text would be -- if certain words are the first thing on the page, then that prominence may be what helps, but not the fact that it's in an H1.

[edited by: tedster at 4:56 pm (utc) on Oct. 12, 2003]

[mikeD]

yeah it's just I've noticed the sites doing best at present and beating me with lower pr are sites with no header tags and very little optimization.

[g1smd]

I have a site that uses H1, H2, and H3 as they were intended, and it has been at #1 since the day that Google first indexed it. I guess it depends on how creative or spammy the content of those tags is.

[plasma]

Now about the CSS issues. If you have your css declarations in an external file, how does any search engine know about them? Are you seeing .css files being regularly spidered? I'm not.

Yes. They do spider it since a few weeks.
I can seen it in my logs.