On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.
Nik from London asked:
I’m using a template website (I’m an amateur!). The h1 tag appears below the h2 tag in the code. Does the spider still know what’s going on?
source
Is this still the case? The video is six years old.
I'm definitely with you, Matt. I think Google has to worry more on websites wherein h1 is being used more than 50% on their pages. They might think that they can attract more viewers this way, well in fact, in my opinion, it does seem like an eyesore.
Hello mate, they are counted separately, so a good place to attempt to get more keywords in. Personally I altered my WordPress template for the posts themselves to have the article name as the H1, and using Yoast's SEO plugin alter the page title myself.
I would recommend including an H1 as it is taken as one of the many signals that search engines use to determine what a page is about. Even though they've made it not count for too much these days, it is still a factor.
My website has a h3 tag but no other h tags. Is that bad for SEO?
And here is a video explaining why heading order is important to blind people: /watch?v=AmUPhEVWu_E
And where did I claim that they would do so?
Perhaps you don't understand the difference between "encourage" and "force".
Google aren't the accessibility police, surely you understand that if 40% of all pages have syntax errors they are going to work around that rather than force people to code their pages properly?
@mattcutts, thanks for taking the time to answer this question, I was wondering about this one myself.
I'd like to echo pigsonthewinguk(!!!)'s comment. Although it's not your job to be policing standards, you usually mention where something is "okay but not a good idea". I'm always trying to convince my clients that "doing it right" in terms of semantics and accessibility reaps rewards with Google and I wouldn't want them to see this!
While it may be true that badly-ordered headings don't mater to Google, they do have accessibility implications Please encourage people to follow best practice, even if you can deal with lesser quality pages. Thank you.