This year, we identified a negative ranking factor. A page that has significantly more unoptimized total H1s, H2s, or H3s than the field, will drop in rank. For this test, we want to see if it works in the inverse - does a page that has significantly less total tags get affected?
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What we found is a negative situation and what we are talking about are unoptimized tags. These are h1s, h2s, h3s, are what we found that were unoptimized but were just the number of tags that were on the page. If you had more unoptimized tags than the average, your pages would drop. What we found is sort of a negative ranking factor where if you have a page that is just not what it is expected for that particular keyword, you are going to harm yourself by having more h tags even if they are unoptimized, is what we are shooting for.
Now we want to run it the other way. In this situation, we are only putting one unoptimized h2 on our test page and 5 unoptimized h2s on all the other pages. What we got from running this test multiple times, this is kind of indicative, in one situation, the test page dropped. In another, it had no movement, and in another, it moved up one spot – kind of all over the board. So, it is not as strong a signal in the inverse where you have fewer unoptimized tags than the competitors. What is interesting is because there was a shift everytime we ran this, this is clearly something that Google is looking at. Google is looking at the htags whether they are optimized on unoptimized because each time we are getting a shift here indicates that it is something that impacts rank but when it comes to, are you going to get into a lot of trouble if you got fewer than the average, probably not. Not as big a deal if you went the other way, if you went over stack your htags then you run into problems, if you are under, the results were all over the page, probably not something to be overly concerned about.