Recently, in a Moz Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin stated that using specific headlines/h tags is not important. He claimed that there’s no difference in using an H1 as your page title versus an H2. If you’ve been in SIA for a minute, you know that this is false.
However, we realized as we looked through our previous tests that we never looked at putting the tags toe to toe in the Page Title spot. Just to be 1000% on H1 vs H2 as the page title, we ran this test.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
This came from a Whiteboard Friday just recently and Rand had a list of 10 things that do not affect rank or a list that does not directly affect rank and the concept here is that using an htag, in particular an H1, for your page title – the title that humans see when they come to a page – Rand was of the opinion that not only does it not matter when you use an H1 or H2, it just doesn’t matter at all if you use an H tag.
He was saying that these are not a ranking signal. I think if you have been in the SIA for four or five minutes, you probably can see that as false. We have run a lot of different tests related to this but something that I realized was we did not do this specifically where we are just looking at the page title and we are just looking at the strength of an H1 vs an H1 in the page title spot alone.
A couple of dossiers ago, we did some test looking at an economy of ranking signals – can a certain number of H2s equal an H1 or a certain number of H3s equal an H2, and we found that it couldn’t – there is no real economy or currency of signals.
Then I realized we did not do this specifically and in all fairness, let us do this just to be sure and the results were not terribly surprising.
We did this test two ways, way number one is where in the number 3 result we gave it a page title that was H1 and we gave all the others an identical page titles that were H2s and the H1 moved right to the top. We did it the other way where we gave the number 3 spot an H2 title and everything else were H1s and no surprise whatsoever, it fell to the bottom.
Clearly, H tags are signals. Clearly, they have different values and the H1 is such a strong signal that it is silly to say that not using that as your title and including a keyword in there is absolutely silly.
When you think about what Rand is talking about here, remember when he was talking about how you’d want to write page titles for clicks and not for keywords? I think it is where this came from. In his mind, he shifted his thought process in a different direction. He is not even thinking about this anymore. I think this is what is going on.
Dori: It amazes me that he does these things and people listen to him, they just eat it up. It is great for us but it is mind boggling that he would say that H tags don’t really matter especially with your title. Thank God for the average person out there, WordPress will make an H1 with your title there so people are safe but it is ridiculous.
When you look at the comments in the Whiteboard Friday, it is pretty funny. A few are – I don’t know about this Rand, I am pretty sure H tags are important - but the rest of them, maybe 80 or 90 are hey, great information, I love it. Those people are taking that information and just running with it.
They are either applying it to their own sites or when they have clients, they are saying that H tags do not matter anymore and you do not need to write titles with keywords, your title and your metatitle shouldn’t be the same, don’t worry about it. Those things are just completely wrong.
Dori: There has been so many people coming in to SEO in the last couple of years and listening to Rand and it is making it easier for us, way easier. I think that is why we are seeing success with SIA members as much as we are, because of the disinformation that comes out and people think it is on the internet and it must be true, it is coming from MOZ and they are really big and they know SEO so it must be true.
Now, Rand is so convinced that just make something that is clickable and that will work that he is even going here in which we know that clickable is great and we want people to click on your listing because that helps but the keywords, when you put them in, you get more clicks doing that. We did that test. In all ways, Rand is totally wrong here.
You often find yourself in situations with people who heard this or read this, the reason why we run these tests even though we are pretty confident what the outcome is going to be based on our previous results is so that you can actually be armed with something. I will not be surprised that you find yourself with a potential client or current client or people that you are working who would say that they read this and you have been talking about Htags and he/she has heard it from MOZ, now you got ammunition.
You can say that actually, this was tested specifically and these are the results. Or when you find yourself in a situation that is slightly different, you can say that hey look, these results here are very close to that and this is why I am saying what I am saying. You actually have ammunition in those situations when you are dealing with people that just do not know SEO or think that they know it.