Using H1 Headings - More than 1?

[KellysTutorials]

I've known about avoiding the use of more than 1 H1 Heading Tags, however, with HTML5 is this going to change... at least that's how I understand it.

According to HTML5 Specs, Each 'section' can have an H1 heading, which at least theoretically means certain web pages that have multiple "sectioning elements" can have more than 1 H1 heading... true?  False?

What I'm looking for here is some insight into the ramifications HTML5 will have on the use of H1 tags.

And would like to know how search engines currently handle this and are they anticipated to change as the HTML5 outline algorithm becomes widely supported?

thanks in advance

Kelly

[KellysTutorials]

Thanks for the answer, I do appreciate the time you took .

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Great question. Yes, HTML5 allows for, and in some ways even encourages use of multiple H1 tags for certain types  content, but.....

It's really not a big deal. Right now, there's very little correlation data that shows much of a difference in rankings between pages that use the h1, don't use it at all, or use it multiple time. In the old days, this was a bigger deal, but not so much.

(interestingly, there seems to be a slight correlation with the number of H4 tags, although this probably is only an indication of well-structured content.)

If there is any effect, the H1 tag in HTML5 may help webmasters better organize their content, and may provide better semantic structuring that the search engines are able to use and interpret.

Hopefully it's a good thing.

[shiftins]

Because it is not out and nobody is the search engine the best you can get is speculation. If you want opinion, here is mine. You can put multiple H1 tags into your code now, even if it is not good optimization, so I don't see why you would not be able to do so in all future versions. The reality is search engines only give minor weight to the first H1 tag on the page and don't even really look at your h2 h3 h4 ect tags. If they ever allowed multiple h1 tags, I'm sure the search engines would either put even less importance on the h tag, if any at all,  or would do what it is doing now and look at the first one and disregard all others. The main use of h tags is to create good readable content not to optimize for seo.