Multiple H2 with no direct links to content and invisible body text - is this an issue?
-
OK, so we've lost pagerank and I think it's because of the way our site works (and we operate it).
We have a videofolio, which shows on most of our pages, showcasing our work. Over time, we have tended to unpublish these pages and created new videofolio pages to show on our home page and relevant pages.
The videofolio is a set of pages, each with a title, body text and a place to insert a link to the video, which is played through a videofolio showcase on our website (www.curveball-media.co.uk). Each is set a category, e.g. film, and when the user clicks the tab for 'film', the thumbnails pop up and the user can play the video.
We have to work it this way as it's the only way to remove the videos from showing on our home page and to show new content instead. Simply deselecting a category still allows the videos to be seen when the 'all' category is selected by the user.
Last week, I found a way of bringing back these unpublished pages by removing the 'all' tab from the videofolio. Then I turned each one into a blog like structure instead. Essentially, instead of the video link being played through the videofolio, we deselected a category (e.g. animation, film etc) and left the page floating. The only way you can access it without being attached to a videofolio category is through the direct link.
By turning off the 'all' category and deselecting the page from any other categories, we were able to properly SEO these pages.
NB: If they are created for use with the videofolio, you can have only extremely limited body text and no H2, as this is the text that appears when you hover over the video thumbnail. That's just the nature of the template.
What I didn't anticipate is that now the code on the home page shows all these now (un)published pages and their corresponding H2 tags. Without a category selected, there is no way to get to these pages unless I create a direct link. I plan to do this through a blog post.
In the home page code, the entire videofolio page shows, including the body text and link to the video. **This text doesn't show on the home page though, i.e. the user never sees this text. **
1. Is it an issue to have so many similar H2 tags on the homepage?
2. Is it an issue that the code has text which is essentially invisible on the home page?
3. Is it an issue that the content is not linked to through the home page visibly?
Thanks!
-
Thank you for your response. Rather than me try and explain further (it is complicated). I've just removed the offending content from the page. Thank you for taking the time to answer.
-
Hi curveballmedia, did you see the thoughtful response Ria Parish sent you? She asked some excellent questions, and we'd love to help you figure this out if you are able to provide some clarifying information.
Christy
-
Sorry, I don't know if I'm the only one but I found this really confusing to follow and visualise. I understand if not, but is it possible to share the link so we can have a look?
Multiple H2s is fine and whether there may be an issue or not depends on how similar they are and how many exactly. Obviously 50 duplicate H2s will potentially be seen as spammy. As for the invisible text, is this hidden to users with something like display:none so is still readable by crawlers? If so, Google doesn't approve of hiding content or making content inaccessible to users with the intention of manipulating rankings. It may be seen as you deliberately attempting to get your keywords in for SEO, without it being of value to the user. With the perspective that if it it had value to the user, then it wouldn't be hidden. So it must only be there to game the search engines.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Multiple brands issue
My client has his main brand on the domain name .com and then 3 brands that exist on .com/brandA , com/brandB and .com/brandC We created a lot of content for .com main brand and we noticed that brandB copied some of our content and put it on .com/brandB . How to deal with this? Canonical tags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Do authority brand (business name) anchor text links still drive SEO rankings?
i have a question about links....if you get a link from a really good authority e.g. bbc.co.uk - website but the anchor text for that link is only your business name e.g Moz and not a chosen SEO keyword target..do you still stand to gain in terms of your overall SEO rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Does changing Anchor text of old built links raise a red flag in Google?
I have lot of links (10000+) built against Exact match anchor text so what is solution to that now? Other than disavowing them all, May I change the anchor text of those links (From Exact Match To Brand Name or naked URL)? Does Google have algorithms to detect anchor text changes and if so, do those algorithms detect these sorts of changes and raise a red flag on sites doing it. I respect your opinions but please only comment if you are sure about it because I am already facing a penalty so can't afford to get another.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ishrat-Khan1 -
Are these Bad Internal Links/Anchor Text?
Hi my site www.over50choices.co.uk is 4 months old and I wondered whether my "Quick Links" section (right hand column) on 95% of my pages with the same/similar anchor text was not best practice ie should I vary the anchor text & the target locations more? ( they tend to point to my top 6 pages) They were set up originally to make the customer experience easy to find things but from what i have read Google doesnt like too many links looking the same ! I also have 3 Graphics (cross sales messages) just above the foot of most (not the home page) pages, linking to my 3 key value pages, all with similar Alt Text tags, again should i vary the alt text or is not a good idea to have this type of link on every page? What is best practice, as i am trying to balance the visual/customer experience whilst optimising for search? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
How do I find the links on my site that link to another one of my pages?
I ran IIS Seo toolkit and it found about 40 pages that I have no idea how they exist. What tool can I use to find out what internal link is linking to them so I can fix them or get rid of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
How many time should a keyword be used in the body of text?
We employee an outside agency to write content for our website as we do not have the ability in house to write unique and good quality content. They have just sent an article which is around 300 words. I told them the keyword phrases to use. When I got the document there is only 1 instance of the keyword phrase(s) in it. Now there seems to be a conflict here amongst posts I have read and general SEO advise as to how many times it should be present (SEOmoz indicates 4 times for instance), our outside agency says it doesn't matter. Now if I have a page optimised for 2 keywords this starts making things tricky and probably looks keyword stuffed to the reader. Assuming the keywords are present once in meta tags, H1, meta descriptions and alt text, what do people think is best practice taking into account recent panda updates? Thoughts appreciated. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My client's website is for an organization that is part of a larger organization - which has it's own website. We were given permission to use content from the larger organization's site on my client's redesigned site. The SEs will deem this as duplicate content, right? I can "re-write" the content for the new site, but it will still be closely based on the original content from the larger organization's site, due to the scientific/medical nature of the subject material. Is there a way around this dilemma so I do not get penalized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mills1 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1