H1 Analysis is wrong or Error message is wrong

[DavidTra]

Please give us a description of what happened.

I wanted to develop a page only using HTML so tried the simple code

text1
<h1>text2</h1>

and Yoast raise the following error

Single title: H1s should only be used as your main title. Find all H1s in your text that aren’t your main title and change them to a lower heading level!

The template I am using for the page do not display the_title();
Obviously there is only one H1 (doubled checked in the page source) and if i change the order to have H1 first then every is fine.

Please describe what you expected to happen and why.

Either it is bad practice for SEO to have any code before the H1 tag so the message is not appropriate and even confusing or it has no impact to SEO so the analysis is wrong

How can we reproduce this behavior?

1. Create new page and choose a blank template ( can be done with html5blank theme with removing the_title(); in header.php page OR with the Blank Slate plugins and choosing "Blank Slate" template)
2. Only add the code
   text1
<h1>text2</h1>
3. put any keyword in the keyphrase field and check the analysis to see the error message

Technical info

• WordPress version: 5.4.1
• Yoast SEO version: 14.1
• Classic Editor
• Blank Slate plugins : 1.1.5

• Which browser is affected (or browsers):

• IE11
• Edge
• [*] Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari

• Tested with theme: html5blank 1.5

[Djennez]

The criterion of this message is:

There is an H1 heading elsewhere than the beginning of the text

So yes, the copy may be a bit misleading, but not enough to warrant an issue. I believe a title, by definition, goes in front of the the text that it belongs to. And as posts / pages in WordPress are generally single instances of which you don't have to define the elements before that instance, there is generally no need to put something in front of the H1 tag (or put in an H1 tag in the post at all).

Closing, as I don't see this as a valid bugreport.

[NickBurnsCCG]

Hello,

I would like to request this be re-opened. I have found a lot of other's complaining about this on wordpress.org, and they have been referred here.

As a paying customer of Yoast, I DO find it to be a true issue as my page is reporting it needs to be repaired when in fact it does not. Showing me "false positives" makes the SEO plugin useless to me as the information it's providing me is incorrect. I can't build off incorrect information.

I only have a single H1 tag on the page. There are no "H" tags above that H1. There is a slider from LayerSlider WP above the title, but that should NOT warrant a giant red dot on my page, and showing red in my list of pages.

We can't work off false positives. We can't work off false ANYTHING for that matter.

If having content above your first H1 causes Yoast to throw an error THAT ACTUALLY DOESN'T AFFECT TRUE SEO, then I would say that IS a bug. Yoast is supposed to tell us what the search engines are looking for to list my page, and what I need to do with those "alarms". If yoast is saying "this is bad SEO" but it actually doesn't affect SEO, then that is a bug that needs to be fixed.

I don't know much about SEO - that's why I have Yoast. If it can't tell me what the search engines want, then what's the point in paying for it? I could just do my own research and do it DIY - which is what I'm going to have to do with the False Positives.

Can someone please re-open this request and investigate?

Please look at this thread on Wordpress.org with all the people complaining of the same thing. Not everyone understands how to use GIT, so they won't report the errors here - https://wordpress.org/support/topic/only-one-h1-but-still-showing-red/

[Djennez]

After discussing this with @jono-alderson I'm reopening this to address the faulty error message. We should split out this error message into 2 variants:

• A "true" error: having more than one H1 in your text.
• More of a warning: having content before your H1.

[mmikhan]

Related: https://yoast.atlassian.net/browse/IM-1756

[mhkuu]

This issue has been resolved some time ago through #18324 , so since Yoast SEO 18.7 👍

[mzughbor]

I have it in the package not in Wordpress plugin?

[mhkuu]

You can follow the progress on the NPM yoastseo package in #17899.