vbAdvanced Missing <h1> tag fix!
 

Anyone doing SEO audits on your vbAdvanced integrated forum will notice all vba_index pages won't have <h1> tags. So how do you add <h1> tags to these pages? I found an easy way to do this today:

Open Template navbar_link and find this line:
Wrap the {vb:raw nav_title} in h1 tags like this:
This will make all your vbadvanced pages have a <h1> tag. All other content will have 2 <h1> tags that in my testing will be identical so it should not cause a problem with big man upstairs (google :P)

Nice, but be sure to check the style to make it more friendly.

Google now ignores H tags entirely. There is absolutely no reason to do this.

Do you have a reference for this opinion?

Google ignores some meta tags like the keywords tag but I have never read anywhere about them ignoring header tags and I do keep up on this stuff pretty much daily. Can you please post your source?

I disagree with you about this, H1 is still imprortant for Google SEO and it is necessary to have on our forums

Ignore probably wasn't the best word choice. Since the advent of HTML5 it is not only possible but encouraged to use multiple H1 tags per document. However, the use of multiple tags per document is due to the change in the Google Hummingbird algorithm from prioritizing tags to prioritizing semantic language. The best evidence of this is in that many sites home pages are no longer the highest ranked page of said site.

The following is a rather long and detailed read but to summarize it says that 40% of URLs do not use H1 tags at all. It also says that while use of H1 tags has increased 30% since 2014 the actual SERPs have only results in 4% of those sites receiving a higher ranking.

http://www.searchmetrics.com/wp-cont...tepaper-US.pdf

There are numerous other sources regarding the changes to how Google reads H1 tags but they are all very similar in conclusion. One SEO site which has been around since 2002 did a detailed study and found that using bold tags on their headings had the same results as using H1 tags.

https://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-frid...-has-ever-made

I wouldn't necessarily dismiss the use of H1 tags altogether, although I will say from personal experience I've had sites with them go nowhere and sites without them skyrocket but that could have been related to the content more than anything else.

H1 tags did once have some semantic advantages over title tags in that certain phrase elements could be added but many of those have been deprecated in HTML5.

I agree with you for the most part. H1 tags are not generally going to increase ranking though they do tell Google what part of the page is important. I believe bold text also achieves this to an extent.

One of your links pointed out adding keywords to h1 tags and this was not what we are talking about here. We are just talking about the use of H1 tags. Ofcourse these days Google is smart enough to notice keywords being pushed. I would also never recommend using more than one h1 tag or adding keywords to it.

As for this mod itself, I am not sure it will achieve anything positive at all by turning navlinks into titles. I really think this is a bad idea and my opinion is that only certain pages benefit at all from an h1 tag. Having them on every page is not beneficial at all.

##Your biggest mystakes article is from 2010 and while adding an h1 tag may not boost rankings or be a ranking factor it is part of a well structured page and I definitely would not consider it a big mystake. :)

So it is. But the article from which I excerpted that link is from 2014. I suppose the author thought it was still applicable.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/...1-tag-for-seo/

You know, if Google would just come out and tell us all what exactly it is they think they're doing we wouldn't have to have these discussions. But if they did that we'd know their top results are bought and paid for.

Yep, and anything we figure out now is bound to change tomorrow anyways..