Horizontal Rule - Thematic Breaks... Semantic Effect on SEO?

[Ryuzaki]

There's a certain HTML tag that I rarely ever use:

<hr>

This is called the horizontal rule.

It slaps a thin line across the width of its container, and of course you can style it with CSS.

Because I never use it but found a use for it in this piece of content I'm writing, I began to wonder what Google thinks about it in terms of on-page SEO.

I know that it represents a thematic change... but to what degree? In my mind, headers are also changes in theme, if only to a minor degree. What does the horizontal rule connote to Google, if anything? Can it be used a visual separator without sabotaging any meaning within the content?

 

[lion1978]

I can't say that I have ever used it, so my answer is based strictly on theory and since my brain doesn't always works the same way most people does I would consider my answer with a grain of salt but let's get to it.

since google does seem to care a lot about user experience, and seemingly trying to evaluate the bennefit of changes from a user based perspective, it would make sense that the tag has a slight positive effect on seo simply becouse it helps the user/visitor to understand that there is a thematic change in content, the difficulty here is that not only have I never used it but I can't remember having seen it used anywhere which could indicate that there is not enough user data for google to take it into consideration.

The really short version of what I just wrote would be :
your guess is as good as mine

 

[Tucky]

I do wonder what a lot of these ancient html codes are seen as by the search engines, after all, they were born last century and things have moved on since then. I'd imagine a visual separation using padding/margins would be just as good as an hr.