I still get SEO 'experts' giving reports on sites I've worked on that claim that skipping from a h1 to a h3 without an intervening h2 will cause lower Google rankings. If this is actually true then I truly despair of this life. But I strongly suspect it's the fact that the SEO community seems to only learn new factoids and never discards old ones.
I have no insight, but I'm pretty confident this is nonsense. A lot of sites have broken heading structures - it'd be a mistake to downrank otherwise good results because of this.
Remember -- these are the same "SEO experts" that will happily tell you that you need to host every web site on its own IP address, even though a Google employee has said unequivocally (over 10 years ago!) that this has no impact on ranking.
I think you'll find the SEO community to be pretty scientific.
Presumably it's Matt Cutts you're referring too - I'm pretty sure he's lied before about optimisations; Google after all don't want people to know all the details to avoid gaming the algos. If shared IP is a strong signal for low quality sites then it's to Google's benefit to avoid confirming that.
We just had "Every discrete page must have an h1 tag with the page title". Even though that isn't appropriate for this site, and the head meta already has page titles and description. So now we implement customizable h1 tags on each page that are all then hidden using `display:none` (which I think is penalised by Google, not that it matters much). Multiple H1 tags as well, Seo guys did not like that, so we had to fork the off the shelf modules in the CMS to make them non-spec compliant. I love Seo consultants and their fantastic suggestions
You work at Google? IP address isn't used at all in the ranking algorithm? Not even to identify "voting rings" (sites passing link-juice that normally wouldn't, eg a site made only for that purpose)?
Can I ask why not? IP seems like a really useful signal.
Not a Google employee, but I reckon ranking down sites with shared IP addresses would disproportionately impact sites on shared servers regardless of the reason. Plenty of websites out there rely on cheap/free hosting providers that shove everything behind an Apache or nginx instance with a single address. This is especially common/useful now that SNI is mainstream and widely supported.
