Auto - update of h1 to h2

[DavidIainJeffrey]

Hi,

I have recently inherited an ecommerce website and been tasked with improving SEO. I noticed a lot of pages were using several h1 tags and, with the help of my developer, used the css to overwrite the secondary headings as h2 tags.

However, since doing so many of the pages have fallen 15-40 places in the SERPS.

The h1 / h2 switch was the only update. Can anyone suggest why the pages would have fallen like this, and if it is a temporary measure likely to recover in time?

Thanks to anyone in advance for your help...

[MattRoney]

That strikes me as a pretty massive change in rankings for a simple on-page change. Even a site-wide one, like that. Have you run any analysis on your competitors to see if anything they did might be to blame?

[DavidIainJeffrey]

Hi Matt, thanks for your response.

I've not carried out any competitor analysis on this, what sort of thing should I be looking for?

[MattRoney]

You know, what—I looked into this a bit more, and you actually might be right about what caused this. Let me get you some more help.

[BMullz]

Agree with Matt, this drastic of a swing isn't likely due to changing your H1, H2s in CSS.

Can you please clarify "used the css to overwrite the secondary headings as h2 tags." ?

Lots of people use multiple H1s or H2s on a page due to formatting reasons. They like the way all of the H2s look (font size, weight, font, etc.) but the best way to go about this is to make custom CSS changes that modify ALL Header tags to look the same. This way you can use proper H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. and it won't look like a wonky cascading sub-title issue.

Some things to check regarding your ranking:

1. Google Search Console for server & index issues

2. Dropped 301s

3. New spammy backlinks

4. Any search console warnings

[DavidIainJeffrey]

Hi Britney, thanks for for response on this.

This all gets quite complicated for my 'non-developer brain' but I'll try to explain how we've done it...

A .php file was used to define the structure of the product listings on our brand pages, so rather than amend every page my developer inserted some code, using a new class to overwrite some of the the h2 tags:

if(isset($modlet->h1)){?>

expandText($modlet->h1);?>

and replicated the h1 style for this class in the styles.css document.

I've checked the source as rendered in a browser and where the h1 tag should be the h2 tag appears, as expected.

Thank you for the suggestions, I'll look into these and let you know how I get on.

[BMullz]

Ah ok, so generally I wouldn't suggest making any forced H1, H2 changes through php. Because, now all of your H1s will be affected (if I'm reading this right), which you don't want to happen.

Also if your issue before was having multiple H1 tags before, you'll now have multiple H2's. What CMS are you working in? Did you have multiple H1s before due to styling reasons (ex. Wordpress)?

If the header font style is what you were bothered with, modifying the css to reflect similarity across headers would work great. Then use the headers as you normally would.

Lastly, this should not affect your rankings that dramatically. I would look at your website analysis, backlink profile and see if any big on-site content changes were made.

-Hope this helps-