Google is sure to have filters for h1 (and h2, h3) overuse. If too many words on a page are in headings, the whole page is likely to be flagged. That would explain why your site went into supplemental. The disadvantage of putting your menu in h1 tags is that all pages get roughly the same keywords stressed. This is not good. For the SE's you want to stress what's unique about each page, that's not the menu but the headings and subheadings. In other words: use the tags for what they are meant to be used for and you'll be fine. Do write headings in a way that keywords get included, but also make sure they look alright to humans as well.
Yup. The web designer actually insisted that it was safe to use 2 h1s in 1 page. but this is already being fixed.
I'm sure he was right: having 2 h1's on the page isn't the problem. It's having them around the wrong content. Sometimes (rarely though) there are articles I publish that do have two main headings. In that case I do give both H1 tags. But to have that tag around navigation is a major no-no.
Ok. but this is how he did it. he tried to hide the other h1 inside the div tags. <div id="heading"> <h1 style="background: url(/images/labels/naxos_h_l.gif) 0 0 no-repeat;" align="left">THE KEYWORD</h1></div> <tr class="content"><td width="100%"><br><p> <div style='border-bottom:1px solid #666; background-color:#e4e4e4; padding:2px;'> <h1 style='margin:0;padding:0;color:#666; font-weight:bold;'>THE SAME KEYWORD</h1> </div> Can someone tell if this is fine for the search engines?
Generally anytime you try and "hide" anything from search engines, you're just asking for trouble. Not sure why the need to put the CSS in the code...makes more sense to have it in an external CSS file. The more code, the harder it is for spiders to see the good stuff.
the settings for h1 is already included on the external css file. but for this particular page, he doesn't want to apply that h1 style that is in the external css
I agree with DWalk104. Trying to hide stuff is just a bad idea. Listing keywords in general is a bad idea. And having it hidden in internal CSS is just plain stupid. Your designer could easily have gotten the precise same effect if he had just given that first h1 a class, and defined that h1.class as not visible in an external CSS file. That way you can scam all your pages far more easily, instead of just one at a time Actually: hiding or listing keywords is also unnecessary. I've had pages rank in google where the keyword in question was on the page only three times: naturally occurring in the text. That's doable in almost any normal website.