new audit: only a single h1 on a page

[Onderhond]

Feature request summary

SEO/Best practice check: the appearance of H1s in a page.

Willing but not able I'm afraid. I'm a HTML/CSS guy with extremely limited knowledge of JS :)

What is the motivation or use case for changing this?
I'm using Lighthouse for quick-checking my code. It reported a 100% score for SEO but it turned out there was a misconfiguration in my components that caused the H1s to render as H2s. While actual SEO impact always involves some guess work, it's an age old best practice to have your H1s mark up the main heading of a page. It's fairly easy to check (is there one or is there none) I think.

Also, it might be useful to check if there's ONLY one, since I believe the system with multiple H1s has been made unofficial again, with search engines pledging they'll follow this decision in months to come.

How is this beneficial to Lighthouse?
It gives more trust in the SEO/best practice scores. I think this is a generally accepted implementation with generally accepted benefits, when Lighthouse doesn't report it, it kind of makes me question the other things it might be missing.

[paulirish]

@rviscomi wdyt

[rviscomi]

@Onderhond do you have any supporting documentation that not having 1 H1 is bad? For example this video by John Mueller suggests that it doesn't really matter either way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsgrSxCmMbM

[paulirish]

Ah! Given that's the stance, I think we can close this proposal.

[Onderhond]

Two things:

1/ the video talks about using multiple h1 elements, not about not using any. There's a big difference there.
2/ "lately" the stance on using multiple h1 elements has toughened a little. While I think it's still part of the standard, it's not recommended as non of the browsers do a decent job outlining the document correctly. The theory is there, the reality just isn't.

So yeah, I still think it's very relevant to have at least one h1 one a page, there's nothing in the video contradicting that or making it sound like it doesn't matter. Furthermore, using just h1 tags probably has some accessibility impact too.

Here's a pretty nice rundown of the current situation: https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/headers/
More context: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-important-is-h1-tag-for-seo/261547/#close

Almost every major screen reader has the capability to skip to the H1 tag on the page to tell that visitor what the page is about. If it’s missing, your site is definitely not as usable and accessible as it could be. As Google places a higher importance than ever on usability, particularly mobile usability, this becomes more important.

I know SEO is a bit of black box wizardry, but everything I've read so far seems to indicate that having at least one h1 tag on a page is beneficial.

@paulirish also noticed you changed the topic of this post to something it wasn't about. This is not about multiple h1 tags on a single page, it's about having at least one of them on a single page.

[rviscomi]

Chatted with someone from the Search team about this. They suggested a generalized version of this feature request that validates that there is at least one heading element on the page (H1-H6). @Onderhond does that sound good to you?

[rviscomi]

🛎 @Onderhond ping. Let us know if having at least one H1-H6 would address your concern.

[Onderhond]

@rviscomi Well, not quite my personal concern, but it would definitely be useful in general I think.

As I stated in the original post, an external SEO audit on a site we recently made stated the lack of h1s, which was due to a misconfig in one of my html (twig) components. I didn't can't the problem myself and the Lighthouse check didn't ever (it gave my pages a 100% rating), which ultimately reflected poorly on the work we did. Now maybe this external SEO audit had ulterior motives or the people who conducted it were badly informed themselves, but in my 15 years of FE experience, I've always heard the H1 carries a lot of weight.

I've been googling a little and every article I find states the importance of the h1 and its extra SEO weight over other heading tags (h2-h6). I was wondering if I'm missing something and if you guys have info that hints that this information is outdated or quite simply wrong?

[AVGP]

Chiming in here: I think from an SEO perspective, making sure that

1. There is at least one headline present
2. There is at least one <h1> present
3. (optionally) The hierarchy of headlines makes sense (e.g. if there's an <h2>, there should be an <h1> beforehand also touches on accessibility, IMHO

I think it's that an audit that at least covers (1) & (2) is quite important.

[mattzeunert]

Tried it out:

• No heading: 12.5%
• No H1: 37.8%
• Invalid hierarchy: 28%

Note that e.g. Twitter or Yelp have a homepage H1 on desktop but not on mobile. Lots of news websites don't use H1's on their homepage, but do on article pages. (The sites I tested are just homepages.)

For hierarchy I checked that there's an h1 at the top level and that no levels are skipped. Not sure it matters for SEO though and I don't think an H1 needs to be the first heading on the page, if there are less important headings further up in the document.

[patrickhulce]

We've decided to split the concerns of #7208 (comment) into two audits.

1. Existence of headings (this issue).
2. Valid hierarchy of headings (new audit: hierarchy of headings #9794).

[khalyomede]

Hello everyone, if I may, Bing seems to treat this as a proper issue (and as I understand the error message it seems to have a negative impact on their search ranking criteria).