Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Will skipping <H> tags affect your SEO?
-
Will skipping <H> tags on a page have any impact on your SEO, e.g. skipping a <H2> so your page has a <H1> and then goes to a <H3>?
Obviously a page must have a <H1>, but does it matter if you skip other headings?
-
I recommend you read this content about title tags. English Content - Türkçe SEO'da başlık etiketleri I hope you benefit from it.
-
In general, well-arranged <H> tags suggest that Google bots will better understand the subject of the page, but quite often I come across websites with missing tags on the first page.
-
It is a content issue. I have worked a lot with H2 and H3 headlines and see many SERP results with sitelinks with Headlines keywords. If you optimize a content with different parts and work with tables of contents, Google can recognize the structure understand your content and evaluate it. Some parts will be shown in the featured snippets as well or in FAQs. To say that they don't have any impact is wrong.
-
I think skipping <H> tags won't affect the ranking factor in SEO.
-
This depends on page structure and if you have any additional schema such as FAQs etc.
Additional keywords within your H2/3/4 tags can be extremely useful but again it depends on keywords you are targeting and how natural these headings actually are.
It's also worth thinking about the other purposes of H tags.
Even though they may or may not have an affect on SEO - H tags help with accessibility software such as screen readers to make sense of your content.
-
Thank you @Tom-Capper and @pau4ner, this is really helpful. I guess it used to have an impact on SEO but things have changed and they're no longer as important as they were.
-
In my experience and opinion, it won't have any impact at all. I've ranked pages with one H1, a bunch of H3 and no H2. Headlines are useful to organize content for users, they don't really have direct SEO purposes (although they can affect it indirectly, as a better organized content will improve user satisfaction).
Although not a headline, something I would never skip is <title> tag (even though Google can create one/rewrite the existing one).
-
From an SEO perspective, I doubt you'd see any material impact.
Even skipping the <H1> isn't awful as long as the document's overall structure and hierarchy remains clear. See this experiment we ran a while back - https://moz.rainyclouds.online/blog/h1-seo-experiment
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Reputable Place For Guest Posts
We do our SEO in-house, and I don't have the time for blogger outreach. Does anyone know of a reputable place where I can submit our content to be pitched to relevant outlets for backlinks and US traffic? I am not in it for someone creating our content; I write it myself and have a degree in the content I produce. I am looking for a place that gets REAL US traffic, not some P.B.N. sites or those where I can create accounts at a post myself. I want real traffic from relevant, reputable blogs or a place where I can have them use my content and find niche sites for me.
Link Building | | tammysons2 -
Page Indexing without content
Hello. I have a problem of page indexing without content. I have website in 3 different languages and 2 of the pages are indexing just fine, but one language page (the most important one) is indexing without content. When searching using site: page comes up, but when searching unique keywords for which I should rank 100% nothing comes up. This page was indexing just fine and the problem arose couple of days ago after google update finished. Looking further, the problem is language related and every page in the given language that is newly indexed has this problem, while pages that were last crawled around one week ago are just fine. Has anyone ran into this type of problem?
Technical SEO | | AtuliSulava1 -
Google keeps marking different pages as duplicates
My website has many pages like this: mywebsite/company1/valuation mywebsite/company2/valuation mywebsite/company3/valuation mywebsite/company4/valuation ... These pages describe the valuation of each company. These pages were never identical but initially, I included a few generic paragraphs like what is valuation, what is a valuation model, etc... in all the pages so some parts of these pages' content were identical. Google marked many of these pages as duplicated (in Google Search Console) so I modified the content of these pages: I removed those generic paragraphs and added other information that is unique to each company. As a result, these pages are extremely different from each other now and have little similarities. Although it has been more than 1 month since I made the modification, Google still marks the majority of these pages as duplicates, even though Google has already crawled their new modified version. I wonder whether there is anything else I can do in this situation? Thanks
Technical SEO | | TuanDo96270 -
Collections or blog posts for Shopify ecommerce seo?
Hi, hope you guys can help as I am going down a rabbit hole with this one! We have a solid-ranking sports nutrition site and are building a new SEO keyword strategy on our Shopify built store. We are using collections (categories) for much of the key product-based seo. This is because, as we understand it, Google prioritises collection/category pages over product pages. Should we then build additional collection pages to rank for secondary product search terms that could fit a collection page structure (eg 'vegan sports nutrition'), or should we use blog posts to do this? We have a quality blog with good unique content and reasonable domain authority so both options are open to us. But while the collection/category option may be best for SEO, too many collections/categories could upset our UX. We have a very small product range (10 products) so want to keep navigation fast and easy. Our 7 lead keyword collection pages do this already. More run the risk of upsetting ease/speed of site navigation. On the other hand, conversion rate from collection pages is historically much better than blog pages. We have made major technical upgrades to the blog to improve this but these are yet to be tested in anger. So at the heart of it all - do you guys recommend favouring blog posts or collection/category pages for secondary high sales intent keywords? All help gratefully received - thanks!
SEO Tactics | | WP332 -
Hiding h1 tags in Magento
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,
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO?
Will blocking the Wayback Machine (archive.org) by adding the code they give have any impact on Google crawl and indexing/SEO? Anyone know? Thanks! ~Brett
Technical SEO | | BBuck0 -
Yoast SEO Plugin and Theme Conflict - Meta Tags
I have installed yoast seo plugin and a theme that I purchased.
Technical SEO | | vivadata
I have added site title and meta description for the index page through yoast seo plugin see here http://screencast.com/t/AdjMynym8Tm however this does not work as can be seen on the test site
http://importingtips.com/test/ does anyone have any advice? Thanks0 -
Should I include tags in sitemap?
Hello All, I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content. I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed. Any help would be great. Thanks, Luke Hutchinson.
Technical SEO | | LukeHutchinson1