Headings (H1) – SEO (Google) friendly

[Christian]

Hi

I have notice that Google have a SEO-practice for headings.
There should only be one H1 for each pages.

Some other themes taking care of this issue.

Buddyboss Theme use 3 H1 headings on each page which Google-bot can see,
and Google punishes the website for that (Ranking).

How can we reduce headings to only one H1?

[Alyssa]

@dahlgaard can you give me a few page examples so our developers know which pages to fix. I can’t promise they will all be fixed because of how BuddyPress works but we can do our best 🙂

[David]

Christian has a valid point, there should only be one H1 on each page (the page title). At the moment the ‘site title’ is also an H1 (in the masthead) which isn’t needed and would hopefully be a fairly easy fix?

<h1 class=”site-title”>
BuddyBoss Theme
</h1>

[Paul]

I might be wrong but assuming you have a logo uploaded, and that image updated correctly, you could just set the site title to display:none in your child theme css. On this topic, I use visibility:hidden instead to hide page titles I don’t want to be visually displayed.

[David]

Absolutely, that’s one way of doing it which would work fine I imagine for that title.

There are also (as Christian mentioned) h1’s for each post title on the homepage of the demo where I’m guessing these should be h2/h3 titles. It’s not a major issue but Google does like to see a hierarchy for headings.

Thanks for the prompt response & keep up the good work!

[Paul]

@modulemedia I hadn’t spotted the post title issue. Something to double-check, thanks. Always best to discuss these things, this is a good community forum, certainly the most active and helpful I’ve used.

[David]

Sorry @style960, I thought you were one of the admins. Will check out the forum, thanks!

[Paul]

@modulemedia No, but it often helps to share! 🙂

[Alyssa]

Got it, send to devs for a fix.

[Christian]

Im using SEOquake to tjek sites for the SEO-value 😉

Ex. http://www.buddyboos.com tjek with SEOquake-Diagnosis this 3 h1 are showed:
–> <H1>: BuddyBoss
–> <H1>: We Build Communities on BuddyPress
–> <H1>:
<H2>: BuddyPress Themes Development
<H2>: We do custom BuddyPress development.
<H2>: Our customers love BuddyBoss.
<H2>: Your resource for everything BuddyPress.
<H2>: @
<H3>: BuddyPress Development
<H3>: Mobile App Development
<H3>: Intuitive Tutorials
<H3>: Outstanding Support
<H4>: Patrick Beffa
<H4>: Kitty Jellinek
<H4>: RugWarrior
<H4>: BuddyBoss
<H4>: BuddyPress
<H4>: Resources
<H4>: Stay in touch

Google want:
– only one “h1” (content-keyword for the specifik site/blogsite)
– 1-3 “h2”
– some “h3”

[Anonymous]

Shouldn’t be a problem.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

That is from Matt Cutts, official Google SEO spokesperson.

You can have multiple h1’s on a page, just needs logic to it.

We are only using H1 for:

– Site title
– Page title
– Post titles

These are all top-level titles, which make sense be told to Google as such. Google wants to know what the page is about. Subtitles and such are all h2, h3, etc.

[Rob]

thanks @michael. I’ve just done a view source of my homepage and noticed this:

<div class="buddyboss-bp-legacy page-title">
    <header class="entry-header">
      <h1 class="entry-title">
              </h1>
    </header>
</div>

How can I remove the empty H1 tag please. It actually appears on all pages…

Thanks
Rob.

[Alyssa]

@godrob this is a file used for backwards compatability when using legacy BuddyPress files. Located here: buddyboss/buddyboss-inc/buddyboss-bp-legacy/bp-legacy-loader.php:122-124