[pmwiki-users]SEO: Avoiding Headings in the SideBar

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 02:06:48PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> On 8/25/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > > Now do you understand why I'm asking if you can detect, in skin.php,
> > > whether there's H1 markup in the page?
> > 
> > Yes, I do.  I think we disagree about the potential dangers of
> > having multiple <h1>'s in a page.
> 
> I don't think it's dangerous per se.  I think we have different
> opinions about the importance of automagically having an optimally
> structured document for search-engine spiders to find.

...but not radically different.  

With the recent changes PmWiki's defaults *do* provide an optimally 
structured document for search-engine spiders to find in the vast
majority of cases.    If an author specifies a (:title:), then that
title is used in the <h1> generated by PmWiki.  So far so good.
If an author doesn't specify a (:title:), then the page's name
is used in the <h1> generated by PmWiki (spaced or not according
to the current setting of $SpaceWikiWords).  Still correct.

The case I think you're covering is one in which an author wants 
to have something used as the <h1> other than the page's title,
strictly for search engine optimization purposes.  I may have lost
the thread somewhere, but I'm also understanding that such an <h1>
created for SEO purposes would normally be rendered with "display:none"
so that the output won't have multiple large-font titles in it.

If I've got the above correct (and I'll be quick to admit that I might
not), then I don't think that "!" is the markup that we should be 
using for SEO.  "!" should mean "produce a displayable <h1>", since
that's what an author will typically expect it to do.

Instead we should have a (:seo ...:) directive that generates an
<h1 style='display:none'> tag in the output, as well as setting any
other items that are best practices for SEO.  What's more, the (:seo:)
directive could probably cause the SEO's <h1> to be output before
the page title's <h1>, which (if I understand things correctly) would
eliminate any need to do <h1> <--> <div> replacement in the page's
title.

Pm