We thought it would be interesting to see if the size of H1 (Header) modified with CSS would be a ranking factor, to understand if you can hide what is actually an H1 with a font size. In previous test, we looked to see if Google would look at larger text and just accept that text as an H1. We found that Google won’t accept the larger text. An H1 must be an H1. We decided to check if Google will give less weight to an H1 if we decrease the font size.
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Transcription Below
This is from Boryslav. He is a stud, I don’t know if you have seen his stuff in the Skype group but he’s a very sharp guy doing really really great stuff and he is doing cutting edge things and I like the way that he thinks.
With this test, it is a very straightforward test. The thing that we found is that, you can’t trick Google with size. So if you did text that was the same size as an h1, the h1 still wins because Google wants to see the h1. Then, Boryslav wanted to look at this the other way – what if they are all h1s but they are different sizes, can we do that with css? So they are all tagged as an h1 but they have different sizes, does that matter?
This is very important because if you have worked with a web developer, you know that they like to do these type of stuff. They will change the size of your h1s and you will end up with sites that have like 5 h1s for some reason but the text is all weird and funky because they did it through css. The idea is, if they are small, will Google even consider them? For Boryslav’s perspective, could I hide some? Could I have an h1 on the page but it doesn’t look like the h1 and it looks like an h4 because the font is so small, will Google count it?
What he did was he had 5 h1s, the bottom was the normal size, and you can see that he changed the font size just with css on each. In the end, essentially, there is no movement. What this is telling us is the h1 is the h1 and it doesn’t matter what size it is through css or what the user sees, Google is still going to count it as the h1. If Google was really considering the size of something through css, we would have gotten the largest thing to the top and the smallest at the bottom, and that did not happen at all.
What we can see is the heading tags is getting the credit they are getting regardless of their size and this can have negative and positive impacts. More than likely, you can see this as negative because everyone has dealt with that situation with the web developer where they’ve got 37 h2s on the page and they are not the right size of the h2s and somehow the h3s are larger than the h2 and those sort of things. It doesn’t matter how they appear, it is just their existence and the tag that they are, is the important thing.