Use Of H1 Tags

[propertyhunter]

I just have a quick question. I have seen a few people mention that the use of more than 1 H1 tag has little bearing on things.

I am trying to sort out a site for a friend and it has 2 H1 tags. My issue is that it is ranking for a quite competitive keyword (don't know how as the whole site layout is a total mess) but in my efforts to clean up the site I am wondering if I should actually reduce the No of H1 Tags to 1 or leave 'as is' for fear of breaking something.

Thanks

Paul

[TomRayner]

Hi Paul

As you'll probably know, the H1 tag has a lot less of an influence on the Googlebot nowadays.  IF it were to come across a site with like, 8 H1s there might be a slight chance of it thinking "this site is over-optimising", but two H1s on a page shouldn't have any risk of doing this.

In super-onpage-best-practice-land, I'd say if you could get rid of one of the H1s, I'd do so - as having just one H1 would let Google be a bit more certain what the page was about.  But of course, the H1 is not the be all and end all and the Googlebot will almost certainly detect what your page is about even if it does have two conflicting H1s.

Consider as well the design of the website.  If the site uses a CSS theme that makes H1s just seem a lot more useful to use, I wouldn't be worried about using 2.

You certainly wouldn't break anything by removing an H1 - just deduce whether it's necessary.  If it comes at a severe detriment to style and the look of the page, I wouldn't bother.  If not, then yeah, removing an H1 may help a bit, but the effect won't be huge.

[propertyhunter]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the reply, much appreciated. I think i will go ahead and remove the H1. Although the site uses CSS it is pretty crap all in all so I might as well change it now as we try and sort the site out.

I just wanted to be sure that I would not trigger something by removing one of them.

Thanks

Paul

[Alex-Harford]

I wouldn't worry about 2 H1 tags if that's how the page works naturally. It's more important to structure your headers in the correct order, so don't have a H2 before you've had a H1, for example.

See Google's Matt Cutts on the issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

HTML5 might be changing things as there are more tags to specify page sections. You probably don't have to worry about that yet though.