Hiding h1 tags in Magento

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Moz Community,

I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles.

The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines.

Thanks,
-Reed

[LesleyPaone]

My view is a little bit different, but to be 100% I would have to look at the site. If the application / module is using style="display:none" to hide the tag, I would not use it. The reason being is that multiple h1 tags on a page dilute or in some peoples opinion cancel out other h1 tags. There are valid reasons to hide h1 tags, like when you are doing fade ins or have a slider with it in there. So I am of the opinion that even if it is hidden Google will pick up on it. So you do run the chance of being caught for keyword stuff or it could cancel out your h1 tag that is displaying. (As far as I know there is no clear 100% information on how Google handles multiple h1 tags. I have heard all sorts of things including it registers the first one seen in code, it registers the last one seen in code, it combines the weight given to all of the h1 tags, and even that they don't matter it is text size above the fold that matters)

If it were me this is what I would do. I would remove the text from the banners and use the built in functionality for the text. Depending on the location of them on the page really depends on how I would tag them, they could be h2, h3, span, ect. But I would opt for on page visible text over using a graphic with text. I realize that you do not like the style that it uses, but it is just a style that can usually be mimic'd with a style sheet. The reason I usually opt not to use text on banners is twofold. It cannot be translated and it cannot be searched.

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Jeff,

Exactly what I was looking for. I don't think we'd need to change the way titles are displayed, just wanted to be sure it wouldn't count it as duplicate or see it as a keyword hiding technique.

Thanks for your help

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for your response, really helpful.

Cheers.

[customerparadigm.com]

Reed - You should be fine to use the "hide" function in Magento to not have the duplicate

tags show up on the site.  If you want to jump into the code a bit more, you can likely change the way that the titles are displayed, but this might be a deeper dive into the design layer of Magento.

Hope this helps!

-- Jeff

[BruceA]

h1 tags are useful, but are not needed by Google, as they will crawl the page to see the content.  However if you have h2 h3 etc tags, but don't have an h1 then crawls will not read any tag at all, as they must be present, completed and sequential.

Hope that helps

Bruce