tangor - 9:39 am on Feb 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

h1 tags have not been deprecated in google... they are still part of the algo, just not as large as the "old daze" (sic). We never throw away anything that works... even if it works a bit less than before. Semantically, h1 is important to the page and anything that is important should be used.

Style it as you like, that's what CSS is for.