H1 tag in Sidebar Affecting SEO

  • Resolved ethnophysics

    (@ethnophysics)


    3 years, 8 months ago

    Hi Ben. You might recall that I am a usually very happy user of the Period 1.500 theme (we were talking last month). But I have recently started using the Rank Math SEO plug-in, and I have received the following warning:

    Too many H1 tags found on your page (2). For the best SEO results there should be exactly one H1 tag on each page.

    I think I have found the ‘extra’ tag in these lines of the source code

    <aside class=”sidebar sidebar-primary” id=”sidebar-primary” role=”complementary”>
    <h1 class=”screen-reader-text”>Sidebar</h1>

    I am not really good at coding, just self-taught jungle survival skills. But I think you may know of some snippet of CSS that I can add to fix this issue. I would like to keep the H1 title and let go of the H1 screen-reader.

    The page in question is my starting page, so I really would like to get the SEO working right.

    Do you have any suggestions about how to handle this?

    Thank you, and bye for now … Tom

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Theme Author Ben Sibley

    (@bensibley)

    Hi Tom,

    Thanks for your post.

    I can see how this warning is troubling, so in the next update for Period, I will replace the h1 tags in the sidebar with plain div elements so that it doesn’t show a warning in SEO tools.

    For some background, since the aside element creates a new “document context,” it is perfectly valid to use an h1 in this position according to the HTML5 documentation. Unfortunately, no one really adopted HTML5 semantics, so now SEO tools mark it as incorrect even though it’s valid. I will change it just so that it doesn’t bug people, but it will bring you some peace of mind to know that Google wouldn’t be confused by this code or lower your rankings for it.

    Thread Starter ethnophysics

    (@ethnophysics)

    Sounds good Ben. Thanks for the quick reply.

    Theme Author Ben Sibley

    (@bensibley)

    Sure thing! I have a few other themes to get to first, and then I’ll have this change made in Period.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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