There has been a major “fact” related to SEO which is doing rounds on various websites, saying that a website should not have more than one H1 tag on a page. It’s Bad for SEO and Google penalizes your site for the same reason. Well, let me state it right at the start. It’s a complete myth. Or Atleast its a Myth now.

Its a Myth Now? Was it true Before?

To be honest, I do not know about the past. I got into Web Development only during the HTML5 era.  HTML5 is more semantics based. Where HTML tags(h1, header, span, etc) have more meaning than they ever did in HTML4. And HTML5 Websites are allowed to have more than one h1 tag.

H1 tag can be used to mark the heading of an independent section in a website. For Example, a Regular Website like mogna.eu, or one of my WordPress themes have the h1 tags in following places.

• The Website Heading
• Title of the post(s)
• Widget Titles

And this is normal, and so many more websites follow the same pattern. And they also rank high for very competitive keywords.

During the HTML4 time, it was said that a website should not have more than one h1 tag, and that tag was used for only the site-title. Well, those days are gone now as a huge percentage of websites now are on HTML5. That rule no longer exists.

Check out the Android Blog.( android-developers.blogspot.in/ ). It itself has more than one H1 tags, and do so many other official google websites.