We’ve had many requests to do tests on the size of text. Last month, we looked at just putting a big word on a page. A big word did not affect rank. Now, we are looking at whether an H tag really needs to be an H tag, or if you can get the same result with text that is the approximate size of an H tag.
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I get a lot of requests for these particular tests and tests like these where people want to see do you really need an htag, is it the tag itself or the size of the text that is what Google is looking at. Last month, we looked at just putting a giant word on a page. If we put a keyword as a giant word on a page, is that going to do anything for rank. We found that no, at least we believe that you really need an htag and not just the size of it. We’ll check it here and that is what we did.
Here we have our h1, that is a real h1 and you can see the htags there. Then using font size 6, that is the approximate size in this set up of what an h1 is. They are about the same size. It wasn’t much of a surprise but the page that had the h1 moved straight to number 1 and it did this every time we run the test.
This is leaning towards size really does not matter. It is how you use the tags. You definitely want to use your htags for those signals. Say this is a keyword that I am going after, this is what I am optimizing, you really need it on those htags. It is not the size. Conversely, we know from earlier this year that willy-nilly using tags is also problematic if your page has 15 h2s and the average is only 1 or 2 h2s, whether or not they are optimized or just existing, you can also be harming yourself. This tests leads us to when you get into an argument with web designers, you really need to stand firm on these kinds of things. You need keywords in specific spaces, they must be h1tags. Everything else should be probably done through css, manipulating font size, not using htags, when you put something into an htag, it really needs to be important. That isn’t to say that every htag needs to be optimized, that is not entirely true but when you use the tags, it has to be with a purpose and there needs to be a reason for using those things because they are just so important.