[pmwiki-users]SEO: Avoiding Headings in the SideBar

H. Fox haganfox at users.sourceforge.net
Thu Aug 25 16:06:48 CDT 2005


On 8/25/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Now do you understand why I'm asking if you can detect, in skin.php,
> > whether there's H1 markup in the page?
> 
> Yes, I do.  I think we disagree about the potential dangers of
> having multiple <h1>'s in a page.

I don't think it's dangerous per se.  I think we have different
opinions about the importance of automagically having an optimally
structured document for search-engine spiders to find.

> I think it makes perfect sense for the page's title to be in an
> <h1> at the beginning of a page; and while W3C may recommend that
> pages have just one <h1>, there's certainly nothing really wrong with
> having more than one as long as the <h2>'s are properly nested.
> Even the tools that process pages looking for outlines shouldn't
> have trouble dealing with multiple <h1>'s in a page.

I didn't mean to suggest that they would have trouble dealing with them.

For SEO I'd like to provide a $Titlespaced H1 with some keywords, but
allow the author to provide their own H1 with other keywords if they
want.  I think authors would want that if they knew how search engines
"see" their pages.

> Having the title automagically convert to a <div> if there's an <h1>
> later in the page is just "a little too much magic" for my tastes.

Understood.

> But a skin author could certainly do it.  The most likely approach
> is to write a Markup rule that looks for <h1> in the output
> and sets a flag that changes the tag used to generate the page title.

Such a markup rule is exactly what I'm looking for.

Hagan




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