Deceptive Headings – My Beef with LinkedIn’s Blogging Tool
I’ve been experimenting with publishing blog posts on LinkedIn’s blogging platform. I’ve seen some posts do really well due to the massive audience they can reach.
I do really like the tool. However… They’re messing with reality!
It all comes down to Headings, you know <h1>, <h2> etc.
Here is what the editor looks like…
So I think to myself…
“Well, one of the golden rules of SEO is to never have more than a single H1 and usually that is the actual post title…so guess I’ll only use H2s…”
(Granted, in HTML5 you can technically have more than one H1 per “section” but this is rare and doesn’t affect my point)
But alas, the headings are not as they seem!
I publish the post but I really don’t like the size my “H2s” turned out to be. So I grimace and try the H1. Ok, that looks much better size-wise.
I inspect it with Chrome Dev tools…
Wait, what!?!!? Their “H1” is actually printed out in the source as an H2!
I totally get why they did that, because they know SEO as well and are building a tidy content empire on LinkedIn.
BUT really, why not just start your style choices in your dropdown with “Heading 2”?
This is confusing and is going to trip up many of their SEO-savvy users. It is deceptive and not making the world a better place. Maybe it isn’t a huge deal but it annoyed me enough to write a post about it…
So LinkedIn, change your Heading naming in your editor, this is surely not Best Practice!
Update: it appears we have some internal disagreement about this. Feel free to jump into the comments section to weigh in!
Bonus: Give your “Publish” button a state change
WordPress changes the button from saying “Publish” to “Update” when you have already published the post and are literally updating it. Steal it from them please (no really, we leave the doors unlocked on purpose)
