HTML5 is a brand new (well, not so new) form of HTML that is growing in popularity every day. All the modern browsers tend to support rendering HTML5 with no problems. It is widely the optimal choice for smart phone browsers and more and more sites are adopting it.

But what about GoogleBot? Can Google crawl HTML5? Does Google pick up any additional factors from HTML5 to give your site a boost in the search results? Can it hurt your SEO efforts?

Googler, JohnMu, answered some of these questions in two different Google Webmaster Help threads.

My take aways are (1) Google currently won’t give special consideration to those that use HTML5 and (2) it might not be worth even going there, if you are doing it for SEO reasons. To me, it seems John is implying to shy away from it, but he knows how awesome HTML5 can be for users, but how awesome for crawlers?

Let me quote John’s two posts, they are similar:

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.