<b>"Skipping from H2 to H4 hurts your SEO."</b>

<b>"Skipping from H2 to H4 hurts your SEO."</b>

Not your rankings. Possibly your screen-reader users.

Proper heading nesting — H1, then H2s, then H3s under them — is an accessibility and structure standard. Skip levels and assistive tech announces a broken outline. That's a real, defensible reason to do it right.

What it is <i>not</i> is a ranking factor with measurable weight. Google uses headings as content hints and to build the structure it sometimes pulls for featured snippets and jump-links. An H2-to-H4 jump doesn't trigger a penalty; it just makes your document outline messier than it needs to be.

The practical payoff of clean hierarchy is the part nobody mentions: well-structured headings are what get pulled into "On this page" navigation and into AI overviews as the scaffolding of your answer. That's a visibility win, earned through structure, not a density trick.

Nest properly because it's correct. The ranking benefit is a side effect, not the headline.

(Your CMS theme that wraps the date in an H3? That's the real outline crime on most blogs.)