Using CSS to hide H1 tags

hiding h1 tags via CSS

[SEMiAM]

I have a developer working on some landing pages, most of which are very graphic intensive. He had mentioned that he can add H1 tags and set a negative margin for these tags so they do not show up on the actual page, but can be seen by the SE spiders. My questions is whether or not this is within Google's and other SE's rules, or if this would be considered blackhat SEO and could possibly get us banned from google and other SE's? Thoughts?

[buckworks]

For starters, given what the H1 is intended to mean semantically it would be illlogical to have more than one per page.

There are legitimate design reasons to manipulate the appearance or placement of the H1 text, or replace it with an image, but stick to the way it was intended to be used semantically ... to identify the main topic of the page.

The way to test whether the proposed usage is acceptable is to view the page with a text-only browser. If what shows up makes good sense for humans, you'll be okay with the search engines.

[JS_Harris]

You won't get banned, but if a human rep spots what you've done you likely won't be able to rank page one either, ever.

[nmottet]

I'm having the same issues.

Our designer used this popular code:

<style type="text/css">
h2 {
text-indent : -9999px;
}
</style>

Which does exactly what you describe: push the "text" over by 9999 pixels so the h2 tag does NOT display on a regular browser (Only in the source code for search engines). The page shows a graphic but not the h2 tag.

However, if you use a text only browser, the h2 text tag will indeed display.

I also question if this is a safe technique from an SEO perspective since this in fact "hides" a tag from a user, but not from search engines.

Any additional opinion?