There is a lot of contradicting information concerning the importance of H1 tags as ranking criteria. Could combining the relevant keywords in your H1 tags assist you with positioning higher in Google?
More importantly, how many H1 tags would you recommend using on each page? There has been a raging debate and confusion about how Google views H1 content.
Given the current state of affairs, do H1 labels play a role in Google’s positioning?

See also: Google: Author Is Not A Ranking Factor
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What they claimed: H1 Tags As A Ranking Factor
There have been several “best practices” and suggestions about H1 tags for many years. Some Of them are:
- To position higher for specific keywords, you must work with many keyword-loaded H1 tags.
- To inform Google what searches you want to rank for. Utilize your primary keyword at the beginning of your H1 tag, secondary keywords in the H2 tags, etc.
- Only one H1 tag is on the page, and it is the first text section on the site.
- Google will penalize you if you use more than one H1 tag per webpage.
Let’s look at what Google has told us for years regarding H1 tags.
1998
According to this line from Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s research paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine: A Case Study, page title was a significantly emphasized ranking criteria.
“For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to webpage titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results.”
2003-2004
Font size, which was once used to determine the importance of a word, was eventually replaced by HTML structure as a ranking technique.
We saw how Google utilized HTML tags to aid the algorithm in handling semantic structure in the patent. Google patent Document placement depends on semantic distance between terms in a report.

In 2010, Bill Slawski examined this patent and described:
“One part of the process behind this approach involves a search engine analyzing the HTML structures on a page, looking for elements such as titles and headings on a page… In other words, the search engine is attempting to locate and understand visual structures on a page that might be semantically meaningful. Such as a list of items associated with a heading.”
The Evidence Against H1 Tags As A Ranking Factor
Google was fully aware of spamming practices involving H1 tags as early as 2009. In this video for Google Search Central, for instance, Matt Cutts, then-head of Google’s Webspam Team, warns:
“Don’t do all H1 and then use CSS to make it look like regular text because we see people who are competitors complain about that. If users ever turn off the CSS or the CSS doesn’t load, it looks really bad.”
He stated that it was OK to use “a little H1 here and little H1 there,” but it should be used for what it was meant for: headers.
H1 Tags As A Ranking Factor: Our POV
On-page text components were strongly emphasized in the Google search algorithm in the early days of SEO.
The precise phrases used, where they featured on the site, and what text dimension they were in all indicated to Google how important those statements were. That is how Google calculated the significance of a page for each search.
H1 variables were quickly found as an easy way to fix rankings. Over-optimizing H1s caught the Spam Team’s eye, resulting in their devaluation.
H1 tags and other important HTML elements continue to aid Google in determining how material on a random website page appears to customers. They continue to assist Google in assessing the significance and linguistic layout of a page.
They support the algorithm in determining what is new with the page, what its identity is intended for, and why it is or isn’t the primary response to a specific issue.
Mueller has acknowledged that Google uses headers as a ranking element.
Regardless, it is insignificant on its own. Using H1 to game your way to the top of the SERPs by employing a large number of them, stuffing them with catchphrases, or attempting to cover a complete page with H1 with CSS does not work.
See also: Google Says Title Changes Don’t Impact Rankings
The fundamental aim of on-page SEO should always be user experience.
That is the thing that Google searches for the most, and it relates to your H1 tags, just as the content quality, image optimization, and other different angles.