Many of you know that we have been building an on-page optimization tool. One issue that has come up is that the tool struggles to read html tags that are misformatted. In particular, tags that are nested in other tags. We began to wonder if Google would ignore nested tags and then decided to test it.
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I see this a lot when I am doing onpage work where html tags which aren’t the best. For this example, we have the tag and H1 and paragraph. This is generally not what you would do if you are setting up your H1 – it wouldn’t be wrapped in a ptag. I had a good talk with Ted Kubaitis about this. This isn’t technically misformatted. It is not usual but he felt that misformatted might be the wrong term. Actually what would be misformatted would be switching the p and h1 so I am actually running that right now.
If you’ve got stuff like this wrapped oddly, not in a normal way, Google does not have a problem with it. The H1 is counted the same as it is an H1 on its own as it should be or I guess as it would normally be. There is no issue that this formation, wrapping it in p tag, harmed it.
Additionally, it didn’t help it. This test page that received this somewhat unusual tag wrapping didn’t get a bonus so it wasn’t counted as a paragraph text using the keyword as well as the H1. In this situation, it was just counted as the H1. The page never moved in all the test that was run with this, it stayed in the same spot. You do not have to worry about making sure that the tags are correct, additionally you do not get additional benefit from it so I would not take the time to go in and wrap my H1s in paragraph text, for example, in order to get a double up on the keyword. You do not get that. So, no harm, no foul but also no benefit.