Renowned Western SEO expert Cyrus Shepard posted a survey on Twitter to see if the industry was familiar with Google’s H1 tag guidelines.
Almost 2,000 people took part in the survey. 57% of them think that Google advises using only one H1 heading per page.
As for the official Google recommendations, they are different, notes NIX Solutions.
So, in June 2020, John Mueller stated that from Google’s point of view, H1 headlines are useful but not critical. Therefore, pages will rank without them. He added in August that heading tags are a strong signal.
Since the announcement that H1 tags are optional has sparked a lot of controversy in the SEO community, Google has posted a separate help video on the subject. In it, Mueller reiterated that H1 headings are irrelevant to a search engine. It doesn’t matter how many such titles there are on the page – one, several or none. Google will still crawl the page and figure out its structure. H1 headings do not help a site rank better and are not a ranking factor.