Semantic HTML is just not a sign of Google search high quality

Google’s John Mueller said semantic HTML is not a quality signal that Google searches use for ranking purposes. One SEO said: “The right HTML semantics and the tag hierarchy must be a quality signal.” John Mueller replied: “I don’t see it as a quality signal.”

But it’s nothing that won’t help Google. John added, “but it definitely helps us understand pages better so we can better display them when we search for them in the search.”

Here are these tweets:

I don’t see it as a quality signal, but it definitely helps us understand pages better so that we can better display them in the search when doing the appropriate searches.

– 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 18, 2021

Google’s Martin Splitt actually has this all in one SEO myth busting video but he didn’t really say much about it.

John has spoken on this topic several times and said that if you do, it can help Keep “clear structure on one page” but it “doesn’t count against a site if they improvise / get it wrong,” he said years ago. As early as 2016, he said Orders of your tags no matter.

In general, anything you can do to help Google understand your website and pages as a whole is a good thing. But it doesn’t tell Google that your page or site is good quality by making sure it is using a good HTML semantic structure – anyone can do that.

Forum discussion at Twitter.