Does the ordering of heading tags matter?
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Uploaded by GoogleWebmasterHelp on Mar 8, 2009
On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.
Nik from London asked:
I'm using a template website (I'm an amateur!). The h1 tag appears below the h2 tag in the code. Does the spider still know what's going on?
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My website has a h3 tag but no other h tags. Is that bad for SEO?
Blinkyman1 5 months ago
@DisgustingArsehole You could easily have both by following some basic design principles. Besides, there are in fact other factors, which are much more important then the ordering of your headers.
But still... Having a h2 before your h1 doesn't make sense, and is really just amateurish and lazy. The sectioning elements will hopefully make things easier.
BlueBoden 11 months ago
Let's face it, for those of us making commercial websites which depend on search engine placement, SEO comes before accessibility. It's a sad fact, but there you go. As much as I'd like to make my sites as accessible as possible for the blind, I'm ultimately going to prioritize SEO. I figure that most blind people are used to less than perfect page layouts and have learned to adapt.
DisgustingArsehole 1 year ago
@wredlich Are you trying to tell Google what is better? I think I'll side with Google thanks.
Jester995 1 year ago
Sometimes it actually makes more sense to include multiple h1s, in cases where the content of the section isn't directly related to that of the main article.. This could be anything from Navigation links, to footers on the page.
BlueBoden 1 year ago
Thanks for the link.
ShaneSelby 2 years ago
Only 40% have syntax errors? I would have expected the number to be more like 85%!
AppleSD2 2 years ago
And here is a video explaining why heading order is important to blind people: /watch?v=AmUPhEVWu_E
pigsonthewinguk 2 years ago
Here's a goofy algorithm I vaguely follow sometimes: You shouldn't have more than one h tag per page per number of that h. In other words, no more than 1 h1 tag, 2 h2 tags, etc. I'm not saying it's correct, but maybe elegant? Or maybe going with the square would be better. :-)
wredlich 2 years ago
And where did I claim that they would do so?
Perhaps you don't understand the difference between "encourage" and "force".
pigsonthewinguk 2 years ago