Article inside H4 tags

Shall I keep it or remove it

[getxb]

Hi,

We have a Info Base in our site which contains a set of archived articles (the number is going up n up). People come to this section to gather valuable info as also to learn new tricks n tips. So its a pretty interesting section but not as popular as was expected.

I did a bit of research and found the articles ranks no where in the SERPs! Now while going through the source code of the articles I found all the articles are enclosed inside H4 tags. On further research I came to know that this will eventually help boost the rankings in major SEs.

Is that so?

(I dont agree and am thinking of removing the H4s)

Regards,
Getxb

[encyclo]

I think that using the

h4

throughout would probably not have any beneficial effect, in that in purely semantic terms a header shows an increase of importance of the enclosed text in relation to the other text on the page, but not in any wider context. So having the entire page content as a header is meaningless.

I would simply switch to using standard paragraphs (

<p>

) for the article text, using appropriate header elements for article titles and subtitles.

If a Google/Yahoo/MSN employee were to manually review the current source code, do you think that they would consider the use of the

h4

abusive? I think I would in their position.

[getxb]

Thanks for your valuable thoughts.

If a Google/Yahoo/MSN employee were to manually review the current source code, do you think that they would consider the use of the h4 abusive? I think I would in their position.

I think it will be considered so. The font size of H4 is much bigger than that of normal fonts used in <p> tags (well I may use inline css to increase the size but whats the point!). It has its own priority. Now if someone do reduce the font size to 12px and yet show it as a H4 tag inside the pages then I will definitely consider it as meaningless/abusive.

One more question: If I have 500 pages, shall I replace the H4 tags altogether or do part by part?

Please suggest.

Regards,
Getxb

[Robert Charlton]

If I have 500 pages, shall I replace the H4 tags altogether or do part by part?

I'd do it all at once. How much worse can you get than what's there now?

I've worked on a number of sites over the years where designers used Hx tags not for SEO but for CSS formatting purposes... figuring, I guess, that if it wasn't used for anything else, why not grab it for styling. ;) I've always had these fixed sitewide and have never experienced any negative effects.

With regard to Hx tags and font size... that's not really the consideration that should concern you, but it is a consideration....

Hx are structural elements, not text formatting elements. In a properly constructed document, they are section headings, much as section headings in an outline, and they describe succinctly the text in the section that follows.

If you're using them properly, then they'd be visual headings on the page as well. You'd want them at least slightly larger, or slightly bolder, or emphasized visually in some way, to make them stand out from the related text that follows.

Burying a heading element in a bunch of other text in an unstructured way is pointless.