Blog Title on Post summary pages are all H1 set

Hi there.

I've noticed that on the blog pages where all the posts are listed all the titles on the blog are created using H1 tags. That means on a page where you have four blog posts you will have:

1. Page title H1
2. Four blog posts each with H1

What should be happening is that the blog posts are being listed with H2 tags.

As there is no way to set the H level on the title of a blog post this is a change that needs to be made at the design/template level. But frankly should probably have been included as part of the blog code natively.

Has anyone come up against this type of issue

Thanks

I understand what you are saying. On my blog, it looks fine - I say that based on comparing the manually entered/formatted title for the blog versus individual blog entries. www.artbypino.com/blog.

SS says that they format it as H1 by design. https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002076628-Heading-tags-and-Squarespace

Hi there and thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately SS is wrong on this, there should not be more than one H1 tag on a page If you install this extension in Chrome, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h-tag/fjigfcghoooegmndmejpoeoodplfmoca

you will see more clearly that every title of your blog post category/collection page is coded using an H1 tag. When you visit one of your blog posts, I picked "PROFESSIONAL FILM DEVELOPING (956) 492-7140" you have 2 H1s the second one being "To order your film processing....".

It's a user choice how they code their page on elements they can control, but where things are hard-coded into the template and you can't get at them, it becomes a problem. What would make sense is that a blog heading was created using an H1 tag on single page view, and H2 on collection pages (I think that is what they are called), this would follow the logic of  recommendations about using H tags through a page to tell a story of importance of page elements.

Hopefully there is an SS developer reading these boards 🙂  Or there is a piece of jquery or other that might rewrite on the fly collection pages blog titles at runtime so they flip to H2s.

Cheers.

I just came across this issue and it would be great if SS resolved it. It's such a pain in the ass

Same issue here. Humph. Anyone have a solution?

Also looking for a solution on this one. Or does anyone know how to raise issues like this with Squarespace?

hi Paul - thanks for jumping in to clarify this. The tools and many SEOs do still flag it as an issue hence the  confusion, but good to have final confirmation. I just did a quick google search also and found this short video from John Mueller at Google confirming exactly what you said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH-4w_0F1vM&list=PLKoqnv2vTMUPhLQ054sMg3vgzy9md9tWg&index=5. Case closed for me. 👍

Just to correct earlier comments H1's were not invented for a ranking boost they were invented to provide a way to organize a document when there were limited options available to do so. That Search Engines used them as a means to understand the important was something that came later and that technicians found ways to leverage them for ranking part of the industry around it.

SEO tools will flag multiple H1 tags as an issue because most of them are using hugely outdated metrics.  There are reasons why properly formatted H tags in a page are good practice, and generally this would be achievable with H tags using the formatting, even if today most designers are simply creating classes.

It's also not just about Google.

Hope this helps.

Regardless of how it impacts SEO - I think SS needs to make the formatting available for designers to edit and manage their site freely. If it's hard coded in then it prevents us from organizing our content.

Something tells me that if two pages had similar content but one was a simple list of H1 tags and the other had a hierarchy of H1, H2 etc then Google would give the better structured page preference.  The content with clear semantically understandable headings provides a better user experience.