mikesingleton.net
This is a non-issue. The only way this argument holds any weight is if the search engines ignore the new HTML5 tags, which is preposterous. Does anyone actually think that Google's search algorithm which looks at over 200 factors including such on-page nuances like keyword proximity, phrase groupings and even parses Flash for hyperlinks is going to ignore the new HTML tags?
There's no way that any of the search engines that are worth their salt will disregard the fact that an <H1> tag is wrapped in <aside> tags or <nav> tags or whatever when it comes to assigning significance to that string of text.
As a commenter stated below, HTML5 is a moving spec, so yeah it's risky to implement this approach now. However, by the time HTML5 is released it's a certainty that the new tags will enhance the search engines' understanding of page content. It will allow us to signpost the hierarchy in a more nuanced way than 6 levels of header tags.
This title is link bait in the negative sense of the word, i.e. it is not supported by the content that follows.
TLDR; this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, the HTML5 spec will be better for SEO.
This is exactly the point -- these HTML5 tags are being used in production today without people realizing that search engines may not being using the new document outline model since it's a moving spec.
The conclusion is to avoid using these new semantics until they are further developed to avoid an unexpected document outline.
Since HTML5 is still a moving spec, it's worth considering how you structure your header tags depending on how much belief you have that this is what search engines are actually doing, given how important the document outline is to SEO.
The website at www.mikesingleton.net contains elements from the site 85.234.191.190, which appears to host malware>>
>> Truthfully I don’t know (if you do, post in the comments!).
Yeah, definitely going to listen to this guy.
Seriously, though. We're way past tweaking html tags for improving rankings these days. Rather than wasting time debating whether you should use an h1 or h2, it's much smarter to focus your time on having good content and getting inbound links from other sites.
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-best-practices-seomozs-new-po...
If their research is correct, this is likely to have little to no effect on your search rankings anyway.
In this case the most important content of the <article> section is the title, so an H1 would be best used here.
The point of this post is to show that by using this new guideline, it leads to problems if search engines are using the old HTML document outline.