Your thoughts on using a H1 like this

[SFD]

I found this website

handy squad . com

They rank really well for lots of areas, mainly the ones mentioned towards the start of their H1 tag on the homepage.

Is there a negative impact to using an H1 this way?

By 'this way' I mean:

A lot smaller than an H2
Lists lots of different areas
Use of colour to make it less noticable

I looked on waybackwhen and they have been using this method for over 2 years so it doesn't look to have effected them negatively at all.

Anyone tried it?

[Ali-v-8]

Hi,
Its bordering, but is not black hat.
Matching the keyword that you target in the H1 is a massive help.
If you go to his other pages you will see how he is targeting the term in the title, description and H1.

His text size and colour is irrelevant so long as he doesn't match the back ground




I found this website

handy squad . com

They rank really well for lots of areas, mainly the ones mentioned towards the start of their H1 tag on the homepage.

Is there a negative impact to using an H1 this way?

By 'this way' I mean:

A lot smaller than an H2
Lists lots of different areas
Use of colour to make it less noticable

I looked on waybackwhen and they have been using this method for over 2 years so it doesn't look to have effected them negatively at all.

Anyone tried it?

[Kev Jaques]

I think they are wasting their h1s tbh, put some effort into them, don't just make them for search engines, tie them with the title and content and they will have a higher relevance.

[Ali-v-8]

Forgot the last question sdf.
Yes i have and yes it helped.

[SFD]

Hi,

If you go to his other pages you will see how he is targeting the term in the title, description and H1.




They don't seem to be targetting the other locations on any other pages though.



I think they are wasting their h1s tbh, put some effort into them, don't just make them for search engines, tie them with the title and content and they will have a higher relevance.

Their H1s seem to be getting them good rankings while H2s are addressing the customer so I thought it was win-win.

[OldWelshGuy]

The problem with CSS contol over a H1 making it smaller than the actual headings is that if someone reports it, then they are likely to get a penalty. There is nothing wrong with CSS control over H1 that is fine. But if you are manipulating the content so that your actual page headings are not in H1, but your anchor text is, then a manual report could well seea penalty.

If I saw a company doing this against a client I would report them to Google for spamming.

[SFD]

If I saw a company doing this against a client I would report them to Google for spamming.

If the H1 was larger than the H2 would you see the list of towns as acceptable?

[fisicx]

Not really as it looks very spammy. There are much better ways to promote your services in specific towns.

I'd love to give my secret away but it's proving quite lucrative so sorry but I'm going to have to keep it for paying clients only

[Gregory]

Without any human input the search engines will not penalize handytools for this. Simply because search engines don't take styling into consideration.

[Ali-v-8]

Remind me never to tell you anything:p

Not really as it looks very spammy. There are much better ways to promote your services in specific towns.

I'd love to give my secret away but it's proving quite lucrative so sorry but I'm going to have to keep it for paying clients only

[greenwood-IT]

Not really as it looks very spammy. There are much better ways to promote your services in specific towns.

I'd love to give my secret away but it's proving quite lucrative so sorry but I'm going to have to keep it for paying clients only

How about sharing a list of your paying clients then? :p

[david64]

Would agree with Ali that this is something that would make SE folks cringe but they would let it fly. They tend to ignore the mass of crud people do to manipulate search engines as individual incidents and instead try and work out ways to marginalise or ignore them as a whole.

IMO this will fool the SEs pretty good into ranking that site for those terms. When search engines index a page, they convert the page's text into something called a hits which is a simplified version of the page that records how important the words on the page are deduced as beeing. Text in the H1 tag and text at the begining of the page are considered important so this will probably gain a maximum score.

You can get away with a lot of this. I've seen a site that has a hidden H1 right before the body on every page with the category name in. It has been there for 2 years and not had any problems because of it.