Remove duplicate H1 from topic & other pages to improve SEO rankings for topic pages

Bug
1

I am noticing this on my site and on all discourse forums.

You will there are 2 H1 tags coming on all topic pages, this has poorly affected our site’s SEO rankings as its against SEO best practices to have multiple H1s on 1 page. It confuses the Spiders/Google bots about what this page is about.

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Happening on this URL and all topic pages,

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All SEO checking tools are also finding the same issue on our site,

https://freetools.seobility.net/en/seocheck/check?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhowtodiscuss.com%2Ft%2Fadin-ross-girlfriend%2F194813&crawltype=1#fg-structure

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Can you guys please fix this in Core please, our traffic has declined a lot especially after Google helpful content core update which focuses on best Onpage SEO and User Experience.

We need to get rid of this below code on topic pages to have only 1 H1 on topic page. The same problem happens on all pages e.g category pages, tags pages etc. The H1 tag for header should only exist on the homepage and each other page should have only 1 unique H1 relevant to the exact page its on.
Below code needs to be removed from other pages, and leave it only on homepage.

      <header>
  <a href="/">
    <h1>Discourse Meta</h1>
  </a>
</header>

Please help, thanks.

3 Likes
2

For a while Google has claimed that this shouldn’t matter (My site's template has multiple H1 tags - YouTube), but I suspect this question will come up occasionally until will try it.

Since the page title is already wrapped in a header tag, the H1 likely isn’t accomplishing much anyway.

(note that this probably won’t be reviewed or merged until next week)

8 Likes
3

This has been merged, so it will be available with Discourse updates later today. @Faizan_Zahid if you could report back in a few weeks that would be helpful, I’d like to see if this had any impact.

3 Likes
4

I have actually updated my discourse from admin and i think I am seeing the change implemented on urls e.g How Tall is Ryan Trahan? - How To Discuss

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It is looking good now. I hope this will improve SEO rankings for my site.

If you think you have any more suggestions to boost SEO rankings for topics pages, please do share. As my site is loosing SEO traffic everyday after Google May and Aug 2022 core updates, i am not really sure what is the main culprit behind.

Thanks for fixing the above. :+1:

2 Likes
5

Hopefully it does, but no. <h1> question wasn’t important at all, but it is nicer now.

There is some other issues. Like too few is clicking your links from search results.

But if you look that Ryan Trahan story you’ll find there is a lot repeat after repeat. And such tricks shall be counted quite fast as keyword manipulating.

6

I’m not sure if it affects what you’re saying, but it seems like you’re looking at the human view. Bots see different markup.

If you have curl installed, this snippet will show what Google sees:

curl -s https://howtodiscuss.com/t/how-tall-is-ryan-trahan/194876 > output.html

There won’t be <noscript> elements in the bot view. I think that noscript content will only show when using a text browser like lynx or disabling JS completely in a regular browser.

7

@awesomerobot While your new code has fixed H1s for all pages other than homepage, now on homepage, there is no H1.

From SEO standing each page of the site should have only 1 H1. The topic,tag,category pages all seems to be fine now after your recent commit.

If you think it’s easily possible to add only 1 H1 only on homepage, you can add that, but please make sure doing this should not again add another duplicate H1 on all other pages, All other pages seem to have correct H1 settings now, it’s just on homepage, there is no H1 and on homepage it will be good to have 1 unique H1 too.

If you think its not needed on homepage, you can ignore my suggestion.

9

Hi, did you find a solution?