Have you ever faced a situation where you searched for something and came to a page with only advertisements? Have you ever visited a site that has only Google AdSense and other advertisements that cover up the content of the page? On such pages, even if there is content, you will have to scroll down to see it.
Most of the websites, from a very long time, have been dependent on advertisements to earn revenue. There is nothing wrong in depending on advertisements to earn an income. Even offline publications do it. However, these publications will only have advertisements on 15 – 20% of their pages. Websites on the other hand can at times go overboard with the number of advertisements that they put on their pages. As the result, the content of these pages can get overshadowed. That is why, Google introduced Google Page Layout Algorithm to reward sites that promoted good content and penalize sites that contain only advertisements in the first fold of the pages.
What is Google Page Layout Algorithm?
Google announced the page layout algorithm first in January 2012. This algorithm was mainly developed on the basis of searchers. It can become irritating to users if sites have only advertisements in the first half of their pages. This can lead to very bad user experience. The first version of this algorithm was meant to penalize such sites and bring them down in the search rankings. Instead, sites that gave importance to quality content would be pushed up in the rankings.
There are two main parts to the Google page layout algorithm:
Advertisements in the first fold of the page: The website will get penalized if the first half of the page has only advertisements and very little or no content at all.
Lack of content in the first half of the page: It is not enough if the site does not have advertisements in the first fold of a page. Sometimes the page may have a large Flash animation or any other non content element. Even this can become a factor to penalize the site.
However, this does not mean that you should not have any visual elements on your site at all. Your website can have a masthead, visuals or even animations at the top of the web page. This will also help you improve the visual appeal of the site. The problem will only arise when the visual element is a large part of the page and pushes the content to the second half of the page where the visitor needs to scroll down to access it. Such a scenario will be considered to cause bad user experience and hence the site will be penalized.
Affect of the Google page layout algorithm
The Google page layout update may not make too much of a difference to your site if your business has a strong brand recall or if most of your traffic is generated from paid advertising campaigns and email marketing. However, if you heavily depend on organic traffic from generic keyword searches, then you will be competing with millions of other sites for a place in the top ranks of Google. In such a situation, if you get penalized for not having good content on your site, then the site can go down in search results. This will have a negative impact on the traffic to your site. That is why it is important that you create quality content for your site and keep updating it from time to time.
It may not be an easy task to plan the content of your site keeping in mind the latest update by Google. In order to make sure that your site is not affected by the update, you need to constantly update it with good quality content. It may be helpful if you can hire a company that can help you with this task. It can further be helpful if your web design company also understands search engine optimization. One way to do this is to find a company that offers internet marketing services. Having one company deal with all these things will reduce the pressure of dealing with different agencies and coordinating with them for different tasks and will also help you concentrate on other things in your business that might require your attention.
—