Question

Interested to know what people think about this situation. I have lots of supporting content blog posts on one of my websites that use a clever play on words in the h2's. Examples: Torque to Me, Assault and Battery, Snow Joking About It. Whilst most readers will likely appreciate these headings, how do you think Google understands them, and how possible is it that they might negatively affect SEO?  

Answer 1

Steven you like little thought experiments like this right? :)

Answer 2

Google appreciates anything that is interractive and fun for the end-user. That's the goal of their algo. Focus on anything that will make your readers read more and smile and come back. Anything else is secondary. The algo is way smarter than you think and H2s have never been a major ranking factor for an article either way.  

Comments

Hmm, I think some people give google way more credit than they deserve regarding certain parts of the algo. For example, the way they handle keyword cannibalization for 2 or more product reviews with similar model numbers is terrible. I could be wrong, but I'm not convinced that google can understand a topic as well if the heading isn't formatted in the way that a none human would understand. Would the bot really crawl 'snow joke' and understand that 'no joke' is the intended interpretation.  

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@diversification9445 Probably not but it wouldn't let that hurt the article in my opinion. You are right about the closely named products, though. there is always room for improvement, I guess.  

Answer 3

No negative seo effect. Fun, friendly and informative will alway be a benefit to the user. But you need H2 to contain relative kw to the Title/H1 topic of the page. ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY H2’s can be used to manipulate ranking! Think about Questions, Long Tail, Semantics and Variable KW terms

Comments

@undertone do you have test data on it not negatively effectively SEO or, is this just your opinion?  

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Dan, yes, I have test data. If you're scared of your header words- use a <span then manipulate the font style. Test it yourself. Remove all your H2s and see what happens. It will drop, then it may or may not come back to it's full power.  

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@undertone