Is no H1 better than bad H1?

[WebMekanique]

I've built a CMS for my company, and the marketing agency (who claims to know SEO but didn't have any clue what Panda was :-/). The title for each page is using the tag used by the navigation engine, which is very short and concise, so the about page, has the title of 'About us'. The trouble however, is that the marketing agency is setting the main header for each page, and I assumed they were going to be doing some sort of traditional header, but instead they are trying to be clever and using long abstract sentences.

For example on a research page titled 'Eddy Current', they are using the header 'It makes the BLAH BLAH PRODUCT
the world favorite in BLAH.'

Am I better off moving all the headers down 1 hierarchy, so that this header will be an H2, and setting an invisible H1 with the page title? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[NathanielB]

It would be far better to have a good H1 tag, but tbh its just one of 200+ ranking signals (and a very small one at that IMO), so if you or your clients or who ever it is really can't be bothered to do them correctly I wouldn't bother wasting my time trying to work out if its better to leave them with a poor heading or remove them!

But look at it this way, if you visit a site with a H1 tag at the top of the page which doesn't tell you what your about to read, would you bother to stick around? This has been said time and time again... make your content for the users and it will pay off!

For example, the H1 on here is the title of your thread, which kind of explains what to expect in the thread meaning you got a reply quite soon, but if you had put "need help, don't know which is best" your thread would likely not have even been clicked by me let a lone give a response lol

In other words, tell them to make sure they are doing all they can to help usability and not to be lazy with poor titles for they pages!

[mrdoyle]

Hi. What you need the case in point is to have targeted/optimised for example H1s.. something like.. Real Estate Properties in New York.
That's a good practice. When you say lenghthy abstract sentences?? How lenghty and how abstract??

[WebMekanique]

They are usually 6-14 words in length, but almost none of them will be relevant to page from an SEO since.

I think I will leave them as is for now, since our product pages are all fairly well structured. I'll let the marketing company figure out how they want to proceed with content pages.

Thank you for the advice. I will repost with stats if I see any major differences as a result (but not likely).