Changing appearance of H1 with css is legal?

[silverbytes]

Is it penalized changing H1 look with .css styles?

Or is this valid? <h1><a href="mylink">textlink</a></h1>
?

I don't want to fool search engines, just be sure of doing the things right...!

What do you say? Is it documented in any place?

Thanks!

[tedster]

Short answer is yes, using CSS to style H1 tags legal and even recommended. An extensive current thread discussing this topic:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[le_gber]

A little longer answer would be yes, if it's a page title and no, if you just want to increase the weight of the text in SE.

Leo

[sean]

Legal? Illegal?

No government will arrest you for using CSS on an H1.

You might find your clue at Google:
[google.com...]

[silverbytes]

I'm not afraid of being arrested, but I don't want to be banned for search engines.

so may I put a link inside h1 tags? can't I make my links h1 style? is that considered spam?

In the other hand, will someone (human or robot) check .css styles for determining what's the point of my h1s?

Thanks!

[dougmcc1]

"so may I put a link inside h1 tags?"
If you have one legitimate h1 tag at the top of the page, putting a link in it should be ok. I did that with one of my clients and they do well in the search engines, although I'm not sure if it's because of that.

"can't I make my links h1 style? is that considered spam?"
If you make every link an H1 tag and use CSS to keep it from looking like an H1 tag, that seems like spam to me.

"In the other hand, will someone (human or robot) check .css styles for determining what's the point of my h1s?"
I think I read on here somewhere that Google has implemented spam filters for checking your CSS file for hidden text but that's about it. And being that they alter their own H1 tags with their own CSS file as sean pointed out, I think you're ok.

[pageoneresults]

I wouldn't do it. Headings describe the section that it introduces. If the heading is linked, that means it probably takes the user away from the section that it is supposed to introduce, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of using the heading tag.

7.5.5 Headings: The H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 elements [w3.org]

I could not find one <h> tag that is linked within the W3C. I only did a cursory search, but I have a strong feeling that it is not a recommended practice.

For those of you following the xhtml standards, there is a suggestion that h1-h6 be deprecated. The working group has not yet addressed this suggestion.

8.8. The heading elements [w3.org]

The new buzzword to watch out for is Structured Headings [w3.org].