h2 tags - bad when used in your main links?

[mpoeltl]

It looks like I've headlined all my links inadvertently by adding h2 to my sub heading (which is not a link) is that considered spam by the search engines? Is it important that I remove them?

Thanks!

[rainborick]

The search engines are pretty tolerant of most uses of all of the headline tags from <h1> on down. While they do give a good deal of weight to <h1>, there's much less evidence that <h2>'s or higher have any significant impact because many page layout programs have used these tags strictly for formatting the text and so they are often poor signals of relevance.

That said, my advice would be to focus your use of these tags to add semantic structure to your pages anyway, and use CSS to control formatting. You will then be taking advantage of whatever ranking benefits the <h>eadline tags provide, and conveying the relative importance of the keywords and phrases that they contain. It's just best practice to use mark-up for structure and CSS for appearance, and will provide the best results while requiring the least amount of maintenance.

[cryptblade]

To piggyback off of rainborick - search engines are pretty tolerant on headline tags - and pretty tolerant of many things.

That said, there are best practice methods and guidelines to follow that keeps you "safe". Think of it as driving within the speed limit.

Keep H1 tags to 1 per page. Use H2 and H3 tags - anything lower (H4, H5, etc.) is pretty useless. Use <span> in CSS as an alternative.

Avoid using headline tags for your main links. What's the point, really? It doesn't make your links any better or more important (think anchor text), plus you will need to change the size in CSS to make it work. It's better to avoid the hassle - especially since it won't help you be more "optimized".

Make these changes - but don't lose sleep over it. Heh.