Duplicate H1 Tags

[doovde]

So I only just realized that Wordpress puts the post title in h1 tags and have been using h1 tags in my posts as well. See here:

Foxy Bingo

Is this a problem for seo purposes? Also some of my post titles are different from the h1 titles I've used is this a problem?

Thanks for any input.

[Randy Ray]

It might be a problem. There "should" only be a single H1 tag on any given page, and building a valid web page is always a good idea.

[doovde]

Yeah I thought as much. Can't wait to go through 500 pages and change them all!

[GregW]

As Randy said, there should only really be one. I don't think that it is as bad as having two h1 tags with the one being the name of the site or something, but I would look to just use one anyway if you can. If you're using wordpress, you might be able to remove the one set quite easily, unless you had been adding the h1 tags in manually yourself.

For what it's worth, I don't like using h2 tags for sidebar navigation titles. I think that they are best used within the article as sub-headings. That's not going to be an easy change for this theme, but it's something to think about for the future.

[dirkjan]

I'd usually rather use h1 for the page name, and a smaller heading for my site name.

[fatbill]

I agree with Randy... a second H1 tag would probably dimish the importance of the first one....

[doovde]

Would you guys turn my current duplicate h1 tag into a h2 with slightly altered title or just ditch it totally?

[doovde]

I have just removed the H1 tag around the post titles so now they are just regular text. Take a look and tell me if you think its better?

The h1 tags are still on category pages but that shouldn't matter right?

I could remove the post title all together?

[Michael Martinez]

Matt Cutts of Google recently said in a video that they don't have a problem with multiple H1 headers on a page. I've heard that Yahoo! doesn't like multiple H1 headers. Not sure about Ask and Microsoft.

Generally speaking, the way an Hx header affects your search rankings (in Google for sure, maybe in some of the others) is they compute the relative font size for your Hx-embedded text with respect to the text on the rest of the page. They assume the text is bolded.

H1 is, in fact, a quick way to specify a very large (default) font size with bolding.

Some people have wondered if they would get a boost from embedding all text in an H1 tag. Think about that: you're using the same font size with bold for all text on the page. There would be no emphatic value to measure. Hence, it's a waste of time.

I've used multiple H1 headers with style sheets but when you look under the hood the pages are horribly mangled so I have gotten away from that. I now tend to use the Hx hierarchy as it was intended, in a tiered/layered outline format.

[GregW]

Generally speaking, the way an Hx header affects your search rankings (in Google for sure, maybe in some of the others) is they compute the relative font size for your Hx-embedded text with respect to the text on the rest of the page. They assume the text is bolded.

So does that mean that Google goes into your CSS stylesheets and reads those for ranking pruposes?