Are you tired of doing a Google search only to land on a page that has an entire army worth of ads occupying the top part of the page? Does this make you feel deceived and taken advantage of? Well if you do, you’re in luck. Google has just announced a tweak to its algorithm that will be designed to penalize sites that are saturating the top half of their pages with ads. (Wow, I sounded like the Sham Wow guy there)
The change comes from customer complaints indicating that it takes away from the user experience when you click on a result and have trouble finding what you are looking for due to all of the advertisements. Google posted this on its Inside Search Blog:
“Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. 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. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”
According to Google, the algorithm change should only affect about 1% of global searches which means that users can expect to see a reordering of results in about 1 out of every 100 searches. That sounds like a small number and one might be quick to disregard the risk of using pages that are top-heavy with ads, but experts agree that it is always better to play it safe rather than ending up buried in the search results.
Google’s advice “continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus on specific algorithm tweaks.” This change is just one of over 500 that we can expect to see by the end of the year so fasten your seat belt.
Some examples:
- Great Content Above The Fold Example
- Great Content But Below The Fold
- Too Many Ads Above The Fold