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line breaks <BR> in <H> headings

by Steviebone
8 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have some <H1> headings that contain <br> line breaks. Two successive <H1><H1> makes no sense. Breaking them out into separate <h1><h2> pairs would cause other dominoes to fall.

Is there any reason that the use of a <br> within a heading can be detrimental from an SEO standpoint? Do search engines remove the line break? Does the removal end up running words together that need to be properly indexed?

In other words is

<H1>Some text<br>Some more text</H1>

seen as

<h1>Some textSome more text</H1>

?
#<br> #<h> #breaks #headings #line #line breaks
  • Profile picture of the author AzzamS
    Multiple H1 tags are not necessary, with that said if you want to use H1 in the above method you simple do <h1>Line 1 <br/> Line 2</h1>
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  • Profile picture of the author Markets
    <h1>Hello, <br />
    World!</h1>

    Simply simple.
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  • Profile picture of the author Steviebone
    Multiple H1 tags are not necessary,
    I said that in the first line of my post....

    with that said if you want to use H1 in the above method you simple do <h1>Line 1 <br/> Line 2</h1>
    I know how to use a <br>, they are already in thousands of headings, that's my point...

    <h1>Hello, <br />
    World!</h1>
    I guess if you are saying I should put a space before the line break, I get that, the question was: is it necessary? I would have to ferret out many thousands of such instances just to insert a space before each markup. I could write a script to do it but I prefer to avoid making mass search and replace on volumes of information, especially where it would be impossible to manually inspect all of the results. On larger documents with lots of text, having spaces before every <BR> would be needlessly redundant. Fixing just the headings across a million pages of text... It's doable, but is it necessary?

    So my question actually was: Are search bots smart enough NOT to run the line together after removing the markup? And what is the impact (if any) of having hard line breaks (using html markup) in major headings on SEO? I'm assuming bots are smarter than that but wouldn't want to see SERPS with broken titles, missing lines or run-togethers.
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      He's saying you should use <br /> instead of <br> in 2015,
      but probably does not matter if you stick with the old one.

      My take, for what it's worth, is that there is no need to break up
      your h1 like that. You can use other ways to make it fit.

      If you simply want the words stacked up on top, again you can
      do a boatload of other things. I have put my h1 in a table that is sized
      so that the words get stacked.

      Just saying that putting a line break inside h1 seems to make no sense.
      It's awkward. Does awkward mean bad? Not always.

      Who knows what happens when you start doing unconventional things.

      Paul
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      • Profile picture of the author Steviebone
        Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

        My take, for what it's worth, is that there is no need to break up
        your h1 like that. You can use other ways to make it fit.

        Just saying that putting a line break inside h1 seems to make no sense.
        It's awkward. Does awkward mean bad? Not always.

        Paul
        If I was constructing the page from scratch I would totally agree, The issue is whether I need to hunt down tens of thousands of existing occurrences and change them.
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    • Profile picture of the author Markets
      Originally Posted by Steviebone View Post

      I said that in the first line of my post....

      I know how to use a <br>, they are already in thousands of headings, that's my point...



      I guess if you are saying I should put a space before the line break, I get that, the question was: is it necessary? I would have to ferret out many thousands of such instances just to insert a space before each markup. I could write a script to do it but I prefer to avoid making mass search and replace on volumes of information, especially where it would be impossible to manually inspect all of the results. On larger documents with lots of text, having spaces before every <BR> would be needlessly redundant. Fixing just the headings across a million pages of text... It's doable, but is it necessary?

      So my question actually was: Are search bots smart enough NOT to run the line together after removing the markup? And what is the impact (if any) of having hard line breaks (using html markup) in major headings on SEO? I'm assuming bots are smarter than that but wouldn't want to see SERPS with broken titles, missing lines or run-togethers.
      The space does not matter, it's just how I write out code.

      As to will it effect the SEO, I believe not (Again I am not 100% positive as I do not write Google's algorithms, but I'm almost sure)
      How the bot basically will look at the code is ;
      > See's beginning H1 (This must be the main topic!)
      > Reads First part
      > Skips the <br> as it's HTML and it's not really ranking you for how your code it (For the most part, you still want to make sure everything is in correct syntax to ensure the bot doesn't get 'lost' so to speak)
      > Finishes reading the text in the H1
      > Ends off of the H1, and moves on, remembering that all that text in the H1 was the main topic of the page

      So, go for it. Use it.
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      • Profile picture of the author savidge4
        I think "technically" there are better ways to do this. I would not use a < br > in an H1 tag. but maybe its just me? Id prefer something in the lines of:

        HTML Code:
        <h1 class="maintitle">Text Line 1 <span class="maintitleline2">Text Line 2</span></h1>
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        • Profile picture of the author Steviebone
          Originally Posted by savidge4 View Post

          I think "technically" there are better ways to do this. I would not use a < br > in an H1 tag. but maybe its just me? Id prefer something in the lines of:

          HTML Code:
          <h1 class="maintitle">Text Line 1 <span class="maintitleline2">Text Line 2</span></h1>
          That's an interesting idea... not sure if it is really necessary... but...
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