[blowski]

I have seen no evidence to suggest that search engines care about HTML5 semantic tags. While the tags may be one particular signal, their algorithms use a lot of signals, so don't rely on markup alone. I suspect if they did give them any value, they would quickly be abused by the black-hats, so they don't bother.

As always, do what's right for your (human) users, and you will eventually get the SEO benefit.

[jordanlev]

Agree with your overall sentiment, but should clarify this:

> I have seen no evidence to suggest that search engines care about HTML5 semantic tags

I think you mean "HTML5 sectioning elements" (header, footer, section, article, aside, main). Because search engines absolutely positively do care about proper "semantic" use of other tags (especially h1...h6).