CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcssseo
sambomartin
sambomartin

Reputation: 6813

From SEO point of view is hiding H1 in this case bad for indexing?

I'm having to use a 3rd party CMS and I cannot change the contents of the h3 (or the h3 itself)

I've not had too much dealing with "cufon" - presume its an old fashioned way of using a specific font. I'm guessing it's not legit HTML so not indexed.

Therefore I wanted to include the page's header in an H1 

<h3>
  <span class="someClassDictatingTheFontToUse">
    <cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Alternative text " style="..inline styles..">
   <canvas width="73" height="18" style="..inline styles.."></canvas>
     <cufontext>Page </cufontext></cufon><cufon class="cufon cufon-canvas" alt="Page" style="..inline styles..">
     <canvas width="76" height="18" style="..inline styles.."></canvas>
     <cufontext>Content</cufontext>
   </cufon>
  </span>
</h3>

<!-- im proposing this -->
<h1 class="offthepage_or_verysmall">Page Content</h1>

<p>This is my content etc</p>

where

.offthepage { margin-left:-10000px; position:absolute}

or

.verysmall { height:1px, position:absolute; left:1px; etc }

Would the page be penalised (from SE indexing perspective) for that?

or is there a more robust / SE friendly way of doing it without it being consider keyword stuffing?

thanks

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1605

Answers (2)

Jeff Lewis
Jeff Lewis

Reputation: 318

Cufon is a JavaScript-based tool that allowed for "pretty" font rendering via SVG, while still preserving the original text. Fonts to be rendered have to be converted into a vector format prior to being used by Cufon. The output might look sloppy in your developer tools after the DOM has fully loaded and JS has processed, but to really see what it's doing prior to all of that, try disabling JS in your browser or viewing the site as text-only. In the example you posted, you should see something along the lines of...

<h3>Page Content</h3>

...though you might also see SPAN tags and inline styles if that's part of the CMS output. That's what most search engines should be seeing. Give it a shot and let us know what is shown when you disable JS.

Here's a decent explanation of how it works with SEO: http://xsdesigns.se/2013/10/cufon-custom-fonts-hurt-seo/

Regarding the offscreen H1 issue, everything I've read says that Google does index CSS-hidden HTML elements. You may want to just use one of these instead of positioning it offscreen; it's a little more elegant (I also would reccommend not using inline styles to accomplish this if you can avoid it):

/* Takes element out of DOM layout entirely */
h1.offthepage_or_verysmall { display: none; }

/* Element still present in layout, but doesn't appear on screen */
h1.offthepage_or_verysmall { visibility: hidden; }

Now having said that, it's obviously not an ideal practice, and there have been strong rumblings that Google and others are processing JavaScript and CSS files along with the raw HTML output. It could be a penalization down the road. Use at your own risk.

Upvotes: 1

saille
saille

Reputation: 9191

I believe the google bot is primarily interested in html mark up as opposed to css/js, though this may change in future.

Google doesn't care for the fact that your h1 is hidden, off the page, or small. Google doesn't see the page as you do, it sees it more like a blind man using a screen reader does.

Upvotes: 1

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