I am redesigning my site and would like to add more than one H2 tag per page? Why? Because I have several topics of equal importance. Will Google penalize me for this? Will Google view this as spammy? I say no. In fact I have viewed the source code of several high ranking sites and many of them use H2 tags over and over. One site uses H2 tags on all paragraph headings and H4 tags on all links in the nav menu and in the footer links. This particular sites dominates the rankings for all the main keywords for the topic and sub topics. Any thoughts please?
Google is not going to punish you for multiple H tags, (such as H1, H2, H3, H4) but I would suggest no more than 4. As for authoritive sites using the same H2 tag multiple times and not recieving a penalty, how do you know this for sure? Maybe Google does penalize authoritive sites for using the H2 tag multiple times, but their credit with Google could outweight any penalties they may have.
Thanks for the response. I don't know for sure that the authority site is not being penalized, good point.
I agree with Windtalker. I think most of the advice is the other way. Make sure you DO have H1, H2, etc., tags. and as far as overdoing it use your judgement. If you think you are . . . . you probably are.
If google is smart (and we can guess they are) the H1-h6 tags aren't given a specific weight, but a relative weight. So H2 on four headers would mean: these four headers are equally important (just like you want it to mean) and more important then the rest of the text, excluding H1 headers. Personally I use H1 for the header, H2 for a sub-header and h3 and h4 for all other headers. In most cases that means there are no h2-headers at all. My site gets found fine. Giving the links all h2-headers is saying: these links are way more important then the content of the article on this page - I'm not sure I want google to draw that conclusion... I mean, I want google to find that page based on the article-CONTENT, not based mostly on the links to it (I mean, I obviously am going to link to it, and hope google will watch that). I've had an article listed in google for a term I used only three times in that article, in the main text, not in the headings, nor in the links to it or anything. So don't worry about the coding too much: just do what makes sense.
Yeah, as Matt Cutts keep saying, design your pages around the users not the search engine and you should be fine. G-Man
For other search-engines it may make a difference though. I only optimize for google - and get found mainly by google. But in general I can't really predict what a page is going to rank for. This one took me completely by surprise. I was hoping to rank for something else.
They are all nice but don't overuse them, but one thing is really the case, using the H tags are mostly helpful with Yahoo and MSN rankings than Google.
Look at a typical blog, top on-page title is H1, all titles for blog posts are H2. As long as there used sensibly, you have nothing to worry about
The site I mentioned that is using the H tags obsessively dominates Google but has average rankings in Yahoo and not so good rankings in MSN, go figure. I agree with this, thanks for the help.
I agree although I guess the maximum number is dependent upon the length of the page. Obviously if the page in question only contains 100 words and has 4 H2 tags it might seem a little suspect.