Just 4 days ago, Google made changes to its search algorithm with the intention of penalizing website owners who heavily load the top of their pages with advertisements. The reason, according to Google, is to weed out websites that make content hard to find on the page because it has been pushed further down by the ads up top, thus making for an adverse user experience.
Google’s thinking is that if somebody visits a website intending to read its content, they do not want to be bombarded by a page full of advertising before they even find the content they came for . A fair point I think, however, Google are also keen to point out that they are not ‘out to get’ website owners that place ads at the top of Web pages “to a normal degree.”
Top Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains in a corporate blogpost:
“If you click on a Website and the part of the Website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience” and that “such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”
From now on, the ‘tweaked’ algorithm will look at the layout of a Web page and the amount of content a user sees on the page, or as we say in the industry, ‘above the fold’, once they’ve clicked on a search result.
Google recognize however, that ads placed above the fold can perform well for website owners, so accordingly, they aren’t trying to penalize websites with what they term a ‘normal’ degree of advertising, rather the move is designed to penalize websites that put what they deem an “excessive” amount of ads up top, or simply make it hard to find content on the page.
Cutts estimates that this algorithm change will impact less than 1 percent of searches to Google.com worldwide. He recommended Website publishers concerned that their Website has been adversely affected by the algorithm change could use Google’s Browser Size tool to view their Website in different screen resolutions.
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