HTML5, semantic web & SEO

[TahoeMountain40]

HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web.

I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?"

Is content found in semantic sections like

<header>,

<footer>,

<nav>,

<aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like,

or ?

</aside>

</nav>

</footer>

</header>

[moldybacon]

I don't think it would have any effect to be frank. Take a look here, a bit old but the closest I could find;

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2d4592cbb613e42c&hl=en

[TellThemEverything]

Agreed; I haven't read anything yet that the new tags/attributes have any effect at all in SEO terms

[MaryAnneG]

They already recognize page sectioning (headers, footers, navigation sidebars, content area), regardless of doctype.  This is why links in some parts of a page carry more weight than others.

[CarlE]

This is something we will be experimenting with in the future. For now, I think we, as SEO's should be considering HTML5 as it will be the future of the semantic web.

Until people start experimenting and trying it out we won't really know and I think there is a definite divide at the moment between HTML5 developers and SEO's.

Theoretically, having an explicit

,

<header>,

<nav>etc should make it quicker and easier for SE's to parse and as we know, Google likes things that make it's spiders job easier/quicker. But this is just hypothesis at the moment.</nav>

</header>