HTML5 tags and SEO in 2015. Does it affect or not? Are there links to research?

Question

HTML

Is there any non-zero influence of "fashionable" markup like <article>, <aside>, <nav>etc. ? for indexing, or is it a 100% myth? If possible, it is experimental confirmation in favor of one or another answer that is of interest, and not rumors and conjectures, and preferably not older than 2 years. I hope to help in establishing the truth!

Answer 1

The new HTML5 tags have no effect. But search engines rank sites with micromarking better and lobby webmasters in every possible way.
From the presentation by Mikhail Slivinsky (wikimart.ru):
Link to the presentation - www.slideshare.net/mikeslivinsky/seoconference2014-v5

Answer 2

If valid layout, even under html 4, would affect SEO, then it would be very easy to promote sites - it would be enough to make a valid layout. I suspect that the PS does not care deeply about your html5 and a couple of meaningless new tags.

Answer 3

Somewhere I saw a summary table of points that affect the ranking to one degree or another. It is important to understand that this influence, if any, is secondary. Many factors are taken into account, up to the fact that the desired keyword is in the tags or the keyword is included in the domain name. The length of the description is taken into account - too long is considered spam, too short - does not make sense. The validity of the document is taken into account. How often it is updated / changed is taken into account. Placement of content in the correct tags is taken into account. But in fact, all these nuances matter only with the overall good condition of the site. A site with good content, on an old domain (from a year old), to which links go and visitors come (and remain, which is important) - will be higher than a young site with bad content without visitors and without link mass. Even if the first one is invalid, does not resize for mobile phones and it has a bad organization of tags, and the second one is assembled according to all the rules. BUT! When the second site works for a year, so that the domain is considered "old", filled with high quality content, gains links and visitors - it may well push the first site, simply because, other things being equal, it takes into account modern requirements.
By the way, having launched about a dozen sites of the same subject, I can say that I have absolutely no idea how they are ranked) Some managed to crawl out on the first page for targeted queries in a year, others, seemingly just as good, hang on the 15th and so on)

Answer 4

I will just say from myself without any statistics. Why not make another site valid in terms of html5 and adaptively? No one will be worse off from this, and in my opinion it is even more profitable to use article and nav instead of div.article and div.nav (you need to print 4 characters less!!!). Again, it was said above correctly - if everything is valid, adaptive, but the site is terrible in terms of the ui component and content - you can not think about the top. Content and appearance are our everything, you can’t get away from it (the design is at least because no one will sit on a site with a red background and yellow letters, which means that the site is less and, accordingly, the site is going downhill from the point of view of PS).
If the site is old - think, maybe it makes sense to remake it in a new way. Make changes to the design, and, accordingly, correct the validity by reaching html5. And regular visitors will like it (if any) and PS will like it.

Answer 5

My purely subjective opinion on this matter, based on ordinary logic, yes, it does. A completely different question - how strong is this influence?
Why does it affect? Yes, very simple. Determining the semantics of a document is one of the first tasks that search engines faced at the dawn of their conception. After all, the title tag is way more important than a span or a div somewhere in the wilds of the dom, right? For it is in this tag that the name, meaning, brief essence is contained. Same with h1 .
About 3-4 years ago, all seo specialists completely italized and fattened keywords, because the search engines said somewhere that, they say, if it’s bold, it means it’s important(Already later, due to the stupid use of this fatness by everyone, the search engines had to artificially underestimate the significance of this factor).
So, after all, there is some kind of priority of tags, according to which this or that significance of this or that part of the content is determined. But what is this priority?
If in the example with title and h1 it is quite obvious that these tags are somewhere at the top of the list of these priorities, then where nav/article/aside/etc are located is completely incomprehensible. Somewhere down or in the middle, yes. But where is it? It is impossible to answer this question unequivocally due to the reasons described by @myfirepuka 'om.
The fact that these html5 tags introduce new semantic meanings did not come out of nowhere, right? Especially since
This means that at least Google draws some conclusions for itself based on these tags. And this helps it separate the main content ( article ) from the secondary content ( aside ). And based on the data from the nav , for example , it can more accurately form quick links in the snippet.
By the way, representatives of Yandex, 2-3 years ago, directly said that their "search engine" knows nothing about html5 tags and does not plan to find out in the near future. It is not known how things are with them after these 3 years.
But personally from me the recommendations are as follows - if it is not stressful to arrange semantic article/nav/aside/etc during layout, then why not? It doesn't seem to be redundant. It is much more important to follow the semantics of the main content (headings and outline of the document, lists, tables).
Well, to prescribe micro-markup entities supported by search engines.
The use of micro-markup not only helps the search engine to better understand the content, but also has additional cause-and-effect relationships for SEO: more informative snippet in the search results -> better click-through rate -> more traffic) .
And, of course, you should not focus too much on this, because it is much more important that the user remains satisfied with the site (aka behavioral factors) and returns to it again and again :)
Something like that.

Answer 6

Other things being equal, it can and will give an increase in weight, but not very noticeable, the main thing is still to focus on content