Matt Cutts released a YouTube video talking about having multiple H1′s on a page, quoting “… it’s not so bad to have multiple H1′s”. Semantically best practice is to use just one H1 on any page so this video has caused confusion throughout the web industry.
Video of Matt Cutts talking about multiple H1′s
Questions questions questions
Are Google ignoring the W3C best practice techique?
Will your website rank better on the SERPS by having multiple H1′s?
Will it validate?
What’s more important, ranking on Google, accessibility or semantics?
What’s the hell is Matt Cutts talking about?
Recent comments on this Video
baselover84 – i believe that all of this is bullshit.
they analize pages with no hierarchy or structure with ease, and all of these questions (and answers) are semi-bullshit.
or at least irrelevant.
McSnookerman – How complicated are the Google algorithms really? They sound pretty advanced sometimes, it feels like a human is looking at the source code.
marksimons84 – For accessibility, I use H1 to head up main sections on a page, Screen readers can recognise that they are top headings of areas and users using them can jumpo between H1′s. H2, H3 etc.. obviously follow underneath these.
Webnauts – Google is preaching to optimize web sites with users in mind, and now they are telling that the use multiple h1 tags is ok? Now I do not understand the world anymore…
erinteare – Yeah, I would never overdo, we were just using the h1 to pull in logos in css and an h1 to deliver the actual header. Thanks for the info Matt!
May 7th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Anyone with a blog will have multiple H1s on the homepage….we can’t really help it so it’s interesting to see how Google treats them.
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May 7th, 2009 at 10:07 am
@Zoe – you can edit your blog template to remove the H1 from the blog name on each post page and make sure the post title has the H1. That’s what I did on my blog anyway… I’m sure google must be able to recognise when it is indexing a blog so I doubt any ill effect will be seen from having multiple H1s, presumably one of them is used as the real H1 and the rest are ignored.
May 7th, 2009 at 11:47 am
The problem is that the spec isn’t properly defined. In theory there is no reason why you shouldn’t have multiple H1s on a page provided you don’t use an H1 for your site title.
My advice though is to move ahead with HTML5 asap. It really makes this much clearer and the sooner you use it the sooner Google can start using its additional semantics.
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May 7th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
I reckong it depends on the page – if you have two (or more) very distinct sections with titles and sub-titles etc, then it’s OK to use the H1 and H2 again – makes the page look better and neater.
Don’t think it’s a good idea to use them willnilly though.