Google Says Fixing Headings Won’t Change Rankings

Google's John Mueller says that hierarchical headings have a slight impact, but fixing them won't change your rankings.

Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about heading elements, confirming a slight impact but downplaying its significance, saying a lot about how Google uses headings.

Hierarchical Heading Structure

Hierarchical and hierarchy in the context of heading elements (H1, H2, etc.) refers to the organization of headings in order of importance or structure. In this context, the word “importance” doesn’t mean importance as a ranking factor, it means importance to the structure of a web page.

Generally a web page could have one H1, indicative of the topic of the entire page and multiple H2 headings that signal what each section of a web page is about. For Google’s purposes, the first heading doesn’t have to be an H1, it can be an H2. Google isn’t mandated to use the first heading as the overall topic, it’s not a directive to their search algorithms where an SEO controls how Google interprets a heading.

The technical specifications of heading elements are found on the pages of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards making body that, among many things, defines the purpose and use of HTML elements like headings.

Google generally follows the official W3C technical specifications of HTML elements but for practical purposes isn’t strict about it because many websites use headings for style not semantic purposes.