Multiple h1 tags in a page

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Nick Thorley: Not sure how to keep this concise for the show but my question is, web standards say that you can have multiple h1 tags in a page ie a sidebar may contain 5 news stories (articles) and each article has a title which can be a h1 as its a self contained object. A footer can also have a h1 as its title and so can a header etc. However seo seem to frown upon this and still want one h1 per page and then multiple h2's, h3's etc. Who do we follow - web standards or seo standards.
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  Edwin Jonk: I would follow SEO standards. Namely, using only one h1 is not against the w3 standards.
  
  Another example is "display none" property in CSS. For the w3 standards it is fine, however, a SEO-er would frown on it.
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  Suraj Gadage: +Nick Thorley ;With the development of HTML5 the answer to your question has significantly changed in both SEO and technical regards. It's now not only possible to have multiple <h1> level headings per web page that will make sense to search engines, but in most cases it's actually the recommended course.
  
  Now you might be wondering what Google thinks about it. Well, straight from Matt Cutts - apparently, there's nothing particularly wrong with having multiple H1s, as long as you over optimize it.
  
  But we all SEO must understand, there are 200+ factors that Google look at when it comes to ranking a particular page. We shouldn't go-gaga-over H1 tag and annoy developers :)
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  Edwin Jonk: +Suraj Gadage Having only one h1 is in Bing's Webmaster Guideline.
  
  Having multiple h1's isn't wrong, but having only one h1 is preferred.
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  Suraj Gadage: +Edwin Jonk ;Agreed. Wherever possible I would suggest to have one h1 tag.
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  Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:26:57 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/multiple_h1_tags_in_a_page +Nick Thorley
  
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