If you have a website that offers a good amount of ad slots above the fold on its pages, you may want to give your page layout another look. At least that's what Google hinted when it introduced the Page Layout Filter algo right at the start of this year, January 2012. And now a couple of months away to end the year, they have announced a refresh of the algo and as per Matt Cutts tweet on 9th Oct 2012, this update will effect around 0.7% of the English queries.
The search giant's have been very heavy on the algo updates since the last fortnight, with this update being the fourth since last week of September. The details about the algo were explained by Matt in his post on Google' webmaster blog when the Page Layout Filter was first introduced around 9 months back. In the post Matt explained:
"As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. 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."
So any sites that were affected by this filter initially and made changes accordingly should see a improvement (however small) with this refresh made a few days back. If however you still haven't or are the few who are affected by this refresh then make the changes and wait till Google bot re-crawls your pages, the time frame for which is difficult to predict; even for Google. Matt also explained more on the algo:
"We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads."
By the way, this algo has come to take a name of its own and is also called "Top Heavy" due to its nature of penalizing the sites that are heavy on the Ads on top part of the pages.
The search giant's have been very heavy on the algo updates since the last fortnight, with this update being the fourth since last week of September. The details about the algo were explained by Matt in his post on Google' webmaster blog when the Page Layout Filter was first introduced around 9 months back. In the post Matt explained:
"As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. 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."
So any sites that were affected by this filter initially and made changes accordingly should see a improvement (however small) with this refresh made a few days back. If however you still haven't or are the few who are affected by this refresh then make the changes and wait till Google bot re-crawls your pages, the time frame for which is difficult to predict; even for Google. Matt also explained more on the algo:
"We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads."
By the way, this algo has come to take a name of its own and is also called "Top Heavy" due to its nature of penalizing the sites that are heavy on the Ads on top part of the pages.
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