Confluence and SEO: Removing multiple H1 tags

[Peter Vojtech]

Hi everyone.

Our confluence pages were evaluated by an agency to make them better for SEO.

One of the findings was that we have multiple H1 tags (Headings) on a page.

The <h1> Tag forms part of the title tag and some sub headings are also in <h1> tags.

You should not have multiple <h1> tags on the page because it could be seen as spam. A page should be structured naturally which means that it will have one main heading (<h1>) with multiple sub headings (<h2> ) and it could have sections within the sub headings (<h3>).

I have two questions here:

- Has anyone else been through this and had to change all H1 tags in the body to be H2, H2 to be H3 etc in the body of their confluence content?

- Outside of someone doing this manually on every page, are there alternatives to automate such a process that anyone could suggest?

Thanks

Pete

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm afraid your SEO company is a bit out-of-date.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with many H1 tags in proper documentation.

But if you must go backwards, yes, I've done something similar.  We used ScriptRunner (there are other tools, but this is the one I've got to hand, and can ask my stupid questions of the guys who wrote it and support it by yelling across the room, so it's easier), because you need to write some search and replace code.  I did it the easy and obvious way - swapping h5 -> h6, then h4 -> h4 etc, which does not feel efficient, but it was a one-off.

[Bill Bailey]

I concur.Typical SEO agency garbage.

I have had two clients go through SEO efforts with two different agencies, and made tons of annoying changes based on these outdated rules.  While it did move us up in search results, there was no net benefit (read no increased inquiries or sales), just a lot of wasted time and effort.