Question: is there any evidence that search engines actually use/respect semantic tags like <main>, <footer>, <article>, etc.? Or anyone here who knows firsthand from Google?<p>Just because, if I were writing a search engine, I would already have a bunch of "AI"/heuristics logic to tease these things out, since most sites don't use semantic HTML5 -- and it would probably do a solid job, since it's easy to compare a bunch of pages from a single site and figure out what parts are changing.<p>Then, if I actually started assuming that <main> or <article> was always the main/article part, it makes it easier for people to "game" the search engine with keyword-stuffing, etc. So, if I ran a search engine, I'd probably just ignore them completely and rely on my own heuristics.<p>(For example, Google completely ignores HTML language attributes: "Keep in mind that Google ignores all code-level language information, from “lang” attributes to Document Type Definitions (DTD). Some web editing programs create these attributes automatically, and therefore they aren’t very reliable when trying to determine the language of a webpage." [1] So I wouldn't be surprised if semantic HTML is the same deal.)<p>I've heard it endlessly repeated that semantic HTML helps SEO, and that's why you should use it. But I've never seen concrete evidence of this -- is there anything that actually backs it up?<p>[1] <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html" rel="nofollow">http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-w...</a>