Monday, January 23, 2012

Google Launches Page Layout Algorithm Improvements

Google has announced new algorithm changes that will affect pages with excessive advertising above the fold.

On January 19th 2012, Google announced its page layout algorithm improvement. In order to improve the quality of search results, this improvement is meant to penalise those sites that have little content above the fold by decreasing their ranking in search engine result pages. This new change targets websites that have excessive advertising above the fold and do not promote a good user experience. Google has said that this will not affect sites that place ads to a “normal” degree. However, they have not specified what “normal” actually is.
This algorithm change will only affect pages with static ads on fixed parts of pages. It will not affect pages using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlays. This algorithm change is likely to only affect 1% of all global searches.

Publishers will soon have to tone down the amount of ads that they place above the fold of any websites. Affiliates that heavily promote products using banner advertising on websites will have to tone down the amount of ads above-the-fold to sustain any organic rankings. Sites that offer banner advertising will have to reshuffle their website layout to accommodate for this algorithm update to ensure minimum impact of organic rankings Highly competitive generic keywords which are traditionally dominated by affiliate websites will soon experience a ‘downgrade’.

Google is trying to demerit sites with low quality content by decreasing their ranking in search. This change in its algorithm will highly affect sites which scrape content and try to make a profit from placing advertising around it. Publishers need to keep this update in mind and arrange their sites accordingly in order not to lose their ranking positions. This algorithm update should not affect clients’ websites. However, it is important to monitor traffic from affiliate sites in order to determine the effect that this update has had on traffic.

No comments: