[In Omnibus]

Originally Posted by RichieBoy67

Google ignores some meta tags like the keywords tag but I have never read anywhere about them ignoring header tags and I do keep up on this stuff pretty much daily. Can you please post your source?

Ignore probably wasn't the best word choice. Since the advent of HTML5 it is not only possible but encouraged to use multiple H1 tags per document. However, the use of multiple tags per document is due to the change in the Google Hummingbird algorithm from prioritizing tags to prioritizing semantic language. The best evidence of this is in that many sites home pages are no longer the highest ranked page of said site.

The following is a rather long and detailed read but to summarize it says that 40% of URLs do not use H1 tags at all. It also says that while use of H1 tags has increased 30% since 2014 the actual SERPs have only results in 4% of those sites receiving a higher ranking.

http://www.searchmetrics.com/wp-cont...tepaper-US.pdf

There are numerous other sources regarding the changes to how Google reads H1 tags but they are all very similar in conclusion. One SEO site which has been around since 2002 did a detailed study and found that using bold tags on their headings had the same results as using H1 tags.

https://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-frid...-has-ever-made

I wouldn't necessarily dismiss the use of H1 tags altogether, although I will say from personal experience I've had sites with them go nowhere and sites without them skyrocket but that could have been related to the content more than anything else.

H1 tags did once have some semantic advantages over title tags in that certain phrase elements could be added but many of those have been deprecated in HTML5.