Changing H1 Tag based on referrer

[uSell]

Hello,

I need some quick help and advice.  We're going through a website re-design, and we have a few H1 tags set on some of our inner pages.  The team is ok with these, however they want to change the H1 tag if the user gets to that page from a page within the site.

Example: 
When the referrer is our site (www.domain.com), the H1 tag = Go to Step 2

When the referrer is anything else, the H1 tag = Welcome to our site

I'd like to keep the H1 tag as the SEO rich keyword text we agreed on (in this case "Welcome to Our Site"), however our developers don't think its directional enough and wants to change it based on the user path.

I'm ok with the suggestion, however I want to make sure that if we choose the option with the referrer that this doesn't impact our SEO efforts.

I'm assuming the referrer will changed based on how the bot gets to the page, but i'm not certain and was wondering if anyone had some thoughts on this..

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks...

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I don't see how  "Welcome to Our Site" is keyword rich but you can make the message changing cookie based instead. Since Googlebot doesn't accept cookies, it will always see "Welcome to Our Site".

Googlebot can't read cookie experiment - http://www.danclarkie.co.uk/googlebot-javascript-ajax-and-cookies-its-complicated.html

[uSell]

Hey,

Thank you..that helps..Welcome to our site isn't the keyword rich text i was referring to..lol..was just trying to keep it as general as possible...

Also, would this be the same if we used session instead?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Good question.. I'm not sure but inclined to say that googlebot wont accept sessions either. They used to have many problems with sessions and would index pages with session ids (don't see those anymore). Hopefully whatever they changed would help you too.

[mytouchoftech]

Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon.

That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor.  Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google.

I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.