Is it alright to use multiple h1 tags on the same

Question

I have a webpage that I use h1 tags multiple times within various DIVs and I style h1 for each div to be the appropriate size.

For example...

#content h1 {
  font-size:22px;
}

#left-nav h1 {
  font-size:14px;
}

#content .recent-news h1 {
  font-size:16px;
}

Is this alright? I am worried about SEO.

What is the best way to go about this? Or am I worrying about nothing?

Answer 1

If it is regarding seo it's better to use h1 tags And If you want to use it for just sytling purpose use css stylesheets.

The most important is that: If more then one h1 tag is used in a webpage then google may consider that page as spam. use can other heading tags other than h1 like h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 any number of times.

Answer 2

I don't like the idea of multiple H1s. H1 is the top level, most important heading and the page will basically be about that topic. If you have an equally important second topic, don't put it in another H1 tag, just put it in another page. It deserves that, right?

Answer 3

Matt Cutts from Google answered to More than one H1 on a page: good or bad? (Mar 5, 2009) with:

Well, if there's a logical reason to have multiple sections, it's not so bad to have, you know multiple h1s. I would pay attention to overdoing it. If your entire page is h1, that looks pretty Creti, right? So don't do all h1 and then you CSS to make it look like regular text because we see people, who are competitors complain about that if users ever turn off CSS or the CSS doesn't load, it looks really bad. So, you know, it's ok to have a little bit of h1 here and then maybe there's two sections on a page, and so maybe have a little bit of h1 here.

But you really should use it for headers or headings, which is what the intent is. Not to just throw h1 everywhere you can on a page. Because I can tell you, if you just throw h1 everywhere on a page, people have tried to abuse that and so our algorithms try to take that into account so it doesn't really do you that much good. So I would use it where it makes sense and more sparingly, but you can have it multiple times.

Answer 4

It all depends a bit on what your doctype is. With html5 it's OK to use multiple h1 tags per section. (don't read, per <section></section>!) When using in example the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype, I'd avoid using multiple h1 tags on a single page.

When using in example the XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype, I'd often go for something like this:

• h1 : max. one time per page
• h2 : max. two times per page
• etc.

Also @joel, even though your answer is sort of OK, please don't try to confuse anyone... I can say I'm a Google software engineer, because I simply work with Google (not the company, but the product) AND I'm an engineer... Please list your company name AND any certifications when claiming things as such.

Answer 5

Just remember that your h1s are used to indicate context, not layout. So, there's nothing inherently wrong with having several on a page.

In this specific example, you need to decide if your left-nav h1s have the same contextual importance as your content h1s and your recent-news h1s. If a clear hierarchy exists in your mind, use your header tags to demonstrate it.