Does Google view small H1 fonts as manipulative?

• Due to design concerns for our home page, we want to use a small font for our H1 tag and place it in an unobtrusive location further down on the page.

  Do you have any information that would suggest that Google might not like that? ...that they might perceive it as manipulative?

Answer:

First off, no — changing the font size of your H1 tag is common practice and Google does NOT perceive it as anything bad. I'd say most sites adjust the look and feel of their H tags using CSS.

That being said, we do believe there's a small benefit to building documents in a structured way. As a best practice rule, you'd use the H1 tag for the headline and then h2/h3/h4 for subheadings. This gives users and Google a solid representation of what your content is about and what these tags were designed to do.

So, long story short, our advice is to build it like you want. However, ideally the H1 tag would be as a headline as close to the top of the page as possible.

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