Rankelle

Heading with no text

The page has a heading element with nothing inside it. Screen readers announce an empty heading and move on, and search engines see a page structure with holes in it.

How to fix it

Fill the heading in or remove the element. A template that renders a heading for an optional field is the usual cause.

When it is not a problem

A heading that contains only an image with alt text is not empty and is not reported. What is reported is a heading with no text and no described image.

How Rankelle handles it

  • SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
  • DetectionDetected on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
  • GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
  • LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
  • VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.

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