SEO News You Can Use: Google Says H1 Tags Useful But Not Critical for Rankings

Perhaps H1 tags aren’t as important as SEO professionals thought they were.

Google webmaster John Mueller was asked last week during a hangout/chat about the role of H1 tags on web pages. In short, Mueller said H1 tags can be useful for multiple reasons but aren’t critical in determining a page’s rankings. Google doesn’t require H1 headings to rank a page.

“You can use H1 tags as often as you want on a page,” Mueller said. “There’s no limit, neither upper or lower bound.

“Your site is going to rank perfectly fine with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags.”

Mueller affirmed that H1 headings are useful when it comes to user experience on your website. Outlining the page structure — using an H1 heading at the top of the content — provides valuable hierarchy in determining what your page is about.

“H1 elements are a great way to give more structure to a page so that users and search engines can understand which parts of a page are kind of under different headings,” Mueller said. “So I would use them in the proper way on a page. And especially with HTML5 having multiple H1 elements on a page is completely normal and kind of expected.”

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