Does The Ordering of Heading Tags Matter?

On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video. Nik from London asked: ...

>> CUTTS: Nik from London asks, "I'm using a template website. I'm an amateur." That's okay. "The h1 tag appears below the h2 tag in the code. Does the spider still know what's going on?" Yeah, I wouldn't worry about it. We handle h1s and h2s very well. Don't make your entire page h1 or h2. But you would not believe the sort of stuff that people put up on the web. There was a study several years ago that said, "40 percent of web pages had syntax errors." And so, you know, having one h1 below an h2, I wouldn't sweat it. You know, there is so many people who do broken web pages and ugly web pages and pages that are not really HTML and we still try to process that because there can be good information on those pages. So just having, you know, some out of order h1s or h2, I wouldn't worry about it.