What does Google say about using h Headings?

[mikepcservice]

I can;t find any hard and fast rules about the house of h sub-headings "from google" themselves regarding content on pages. Yoast mentions using only one h1 heading but nothing on how to use the other h2-h6 for sub-headings, any ideas on this and is this for google robots or only for the reader please?

 

[djbaxter]

John Mueller recently addressed that (or more accurately addressed it again):

Google Says H1 Headings Are Useful but Not Critical

Google's John Mueller answers why H1 headings are useful but not critical

www.searchenginejournal.com

This is the question:

“Is it mandatory to just have one H1 tag on a web page or can it be used multiple times?”

Google’s John Mueller answered that you can use as many H1s as you want. He also said you can omit using the H1 heading tag, too.

John Mueller’s answer about H1 heading tags:

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

Then later on, at the end of his answer, he reaffirmed that publishers are free to choose how they want to use the H1 heading tag:

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

 

[mikepcservice]

Thanks! So then would it be accurate to say the h headings are best used more for design purposes only on a page, to make the headings stand out?

 

[djbaxter]

Thanks! So then would it be accurate to say the h headings are best used more for design purposes only on a page, to make the headings stand out?

Yes exactly. Use as many or as few as you wish and use whatever H level you wish.

I rarely use H1. I mostly use H2 to H4. Any other hradings or subheadings are just bolded.

 

[mikepcservice]

Appreciate it!

 

[djbaxter]

Happy to help.

 

[Greg Schueler]

Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.
- SEO Starter Guide: The Basics | Google Search Central

 

[Justin Mosebach]

I'm not sure that having more than one H1 tag "could hurt you". It seems to be more of missing an opportunity to help Google more clearly understand and rank the page. I heard Kyle Roof (the guy who won a local SEO contest by using lorem ipsum) mention at 3:28 into this Authority Hacker podcast that he thinks headings are still important based on this part (transcript below) of the Oct 8, 2020 episode of "Search Off the Record".

Google's talking about how they index content and normalize HTML (which Kyle interprets as fixing bad HTML), so that they can see the actual levels of headings on the page.

[00:11:24] Gary Illyes: But we still try to make sense of it. If you have really broken HTML,
then that's kind of hard. So we push all the HTML through an HTML lexer. Again, search for the name.
You can figure out what that is. But, basically, we normalize the HTML. And then, it's much easier to
process it. And then, there comes the hotstepper: h1, h2, h3, h4.

[00:11:53] Martin Splitt: [gasps]

[00:11:54] Gary Illyes: I know. All these header tags are also normalized through rendering.
We try to understand the styling that was applied on the h tags, so we can determine the relative
importance of the h tags compared to each other. Let's see, what else we do there?