A page with 13 <h1> tags, how does it rank?

So theres a website in my niche which currently ranks top for a lot of high value keywords, however when you go into the source code on their site you can see they have 13 h1 tags this one page that ranks well.

Just wondered if anyone would be able to shed light on how a website so badly optimised is ranking top?

lingy21 said:

So theres a website in my niche which currently ranks top for a lot of high value keywords, however when you go into the source code on their site you can see they have 13 h1 tags this one page that ranks well.

Just wondered if anyone would be able to shed light on how a website so badly optimised is ranking top?

Click to expand...

Reasons are many. Here are few:

• Age of domain
• High-quality backlinks (.edu or .gov…)
• High click-through rate and low bounce rate
• Useful and quality content
• Site with more content
• Sites that are updated more often
• Low competition search term
• Good design
• Cross-linking
• Mobile-friendly site

They may have some high quality links! I have ranket total crap websites with just the right backlinks!

Check their cache on google (cache:URL) and see if the h1 tags are also there.

13 h1's should not necessarily mean a page is poorly optimized or wont rank well

in the last few years we've seen google rank pages with zero h1s, h2s, or h3s. You think bc a website owner doesnt know what those are that he wont be able to rank?

Effectively, there is minuscule difference bw an h1 and a big bold paragraph header. Things are moving more toward UX, not technicalities.

Also, im curious to know the word count of the page you speak of - if its a 2000 word page its not the worst crime to have all those h1s.

I think it may be that Google isn't that fussed about whether you have the right amount of h1 tags or h2 tags or if your h1 tag should be a p tag and so on. It's more fussed about what it ends up looking like, how it actually renders in the browser.