tedster - 10:04 pm on Aug 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

Google (as well as any SE) will use whatever they find useful to determine releveance programatically. Two years ago there was such widespread abuse of the H1 that Matt Cutts mentioned at the London PubCon that Google was currently only able to use H1 as if it were plain text - any relevance signals were lost in the noise at that time.

Has this changed? Well, today I very seldom see H1 tags wrapping entire paragraphs, or keyword lists, and so on. But no little Google bird has mentioned anything new that I've heard. Still, with an element as potentially important as the H1 tag, I'm sure that Google tests all the time to see if there is a dependable "relevance signal" in there.

I will continue to use the H1. It helps to create a well-formed document and just because others have abused it is no reason for me to create crappy mark-up.