: If multiple h1 elements are bad practice, how come Optimizely has more than one h1? Optimizley landing page banner has 2 h1 elements: <div class="header-container tooltip-container"> <h1

@Shakeerah822

The first <H1>Hello!</H1> is actually a placeholder for geo-targeting. It appends the name of your company (based on IP information) to that hello and if you visit it at night, it changes the text to Still Awake? (even though the code in the backend remains 'hello') followed by their second H1.

For example, from my local PC, when I open the website, it shows Hello, (ISP Name) but when I open it from a VPS located in France (where it's past midnight) it shows Still Awake? followed by their hard coded H1.

Even though they could have included all of that within a single H1, I don't see a problem with their setup as they are using the H1s to enhance the UX and not stuffing in keywords to game Google.

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@Michele947

It's not bad practice in principle, but the implementation in your example is.

Using multiple <h1> elements on a page is perfectly valid HTML and no problem for SEO if used appropriately (in short, as headings for discrete sections of content).

Former Google engineer Matt Cutts confirms this in a Q&A video. Note he states that overusing <h1>s has been abused in the past and their algorithms "try to take that into account".

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@Jamie184

Google handles some HTML elements differently than all the rest. We know that the title tag, description meta-tag, keywords meta-tag (depreciated), and h1 tag have unique influence in how much weight is given to these elements and the particular influences they have. In that, Google will always take the first one found and ignore the rest. This is more a historical behavior than not.

This means that while it is not a good idea to have more than one h1 tag, it is also a waste of time.

Be that as it may, who knows why they use more than one h1 tag especially since the first one in your example is so useless? It is likely that the first h1 tag exists for another reason, not SEO. It is probably a mistake. Otherwise, it does not make sense.

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@Si4351233

You're right. Two h1 elements in the same section is not a good idea, semantically or structurally, but it's not a HTML error. It's most likely a copy/paste error on their part but who knows why some people do what they do.

Don't always look at any one company and think they write code perfectly in every way, all the time, no matter who they are.

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