Websites with “too many ads” should watch out. The latest change in Google’s algorithm, called the “page layout algorithm” will start checking website and individual pages that display too many advertisements that users have a difficult time finding the content they’ve been looking for.
Posted in Google’s Inside Search blog over the weekend, it states that:
“…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.”
The same post was also shared in the Google Webmaster Central Blog.
While Google understands that ads are part of the Internet marketing industry and placing above-the-fold ads are common for most websites; however, user experience is not very good at this point. Pages that dedicate a larger portion of the first page of the page to ads will be affected by this most recent algorithm change.
In terms of how it will affect results in search engines, Google states that it will only affect less than 1% of the global searches. This means that only a slight reordering of the results on the search page will be noticeable to a user.
For a search engine optimization company, this means redesigning the page layout of a client’s website to make sure that visitors can immediately see the content they are looking for, instead of seeing tons of ads placed above-the-fold. Google suggests using the Browser Size tool to check how the page will display under different resolutions.
Search engine optimization specialists should check the results in search engine pages once in a while as Google recrawls the pages and assess the changes. Several factors that could impact the duration of when the results will reflect are the number of pages on the website and the efficiency of how Googlebot crawls the content.