Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update – this is a landing page quality update, which looks at “the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”. As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn’t this sound very similar to Panda though?
At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that:
“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” asking publishers to consider, “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”
With Danny Sullivan following up to say:
“Many already assume that Google’s Panda algorithm is already penalizing ad heavy pages. This suggests that this either is not part of the Panda algorithm or that it might be made a separate and more specific algorithm in the works.”
So reading into this, I would suggest that if this wasn’t rolled out last year - it just has been!
Google has stated that this isn’t a change which will affect every site that has ads above the fold, just those that have an excessive number of ads which obstruct users from getting to the content that they were searching for:
“This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.”
So that means that if you’ve been penalised, it should be easy enough to get out of. It’s an algorithmic penalty, not a manual one – so if you fix the layout of your page, Google’s filters will pick this up the next time it’s re-crawled and whatever penalty you had previously will be lifted. We’ve seen this many times with other algorithm penalties – and once you figured out what’s caused the drop in rankings, it’s not too difficult to get out of. It’s the manual penalties you want to avoid, Google take note!
And overall it’s not likely to affect a huge number of sites (1% predicted by Google), but it looks like affiliates and ad monetised sites are those most open to suffering. So is this the latest, unofficial panda update? Maybe Google has just got bored of keeping track of the numbers now that it’s 2012 – what do you think?
Image credit: David Allen
I finding this difficult to comprehend. Google clearly displays ads all over its pages in search results, and potentially user experience does suffer – take a search for ‘diets’.
Secondly, it appears like a move that can make other company’s advertising less relevant. If ads have to be ‘less noticeable’ then it is likely their effectiveness will suffer. Consequently CTRs could be damaged and thus ad revenue will be less. Since Google will be looking for ways to out position Facebook in the display battle, it seems like a move than can damage other companies display and allow Google to take over.
That said, I suppose unless your pages are totally filled with ads above the fold, then there probably won’t be too much effect. Will be interesting though!
Hi James, interesting theory on it being a move to make other company’s advertising less relevant. Although, surely Google AdSense will take the biggest hit overall due to it’s popularity?
It’s definitely an interesting one to watch, at the moment it is a bit unclear as to where Google draw the line on how many ads above the fold? Are 2-3 ad blocks too many? What sizes? Or does it needs to be plastered with 5-6+?
Although because they have an algorithm to pick this up (rather than it being a manual review), for content publishers it’s probably a case of monitoring ranking movement over the next few days/weeks – and then making minor layout tweaks to try and measure the impact, making improvements from there.
Yeah true about Adsense… although that is some of the crappiest looking advertising around and it’s not often a great move to have it prominently above the fold. Most big publishers hide it away, if they use it at all.
Hmm, as James says, this does sound slightly hypocritical considering Google are constantly dominating the top half of the SERPS with Adwords ads disguised as organic listings, as well as their other properties (Places, YT, etc).
I don´t think it´s a Panda update since they clearly state that “the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes”. Typical for Panda is that anking changes are made upon Panda updates and not on each crawling of websites “so that it will be classified as high quality in the next Panda update” (http://www.stonetemple.com/new-clarity-on-reconsideration-requests-from-tiffany-oberoi/).
@James – that’s a good point, so maybe if AdSense is more commonly used below the fold anyway it’s less likely to impact Google’s revenue. Very smart if true!
@Alex agreed, the SERPs layouts are getting more deceptive to get you clicking ads and also dominating the results above the fold.
@Mikael interesting link, it does appear to be less content-related compared to previous updates. But layout is closely related to the panda factors too, quality of content/landing page, user experience etc…
Google Adsense says to use 3 ads in a page which they allowed, unfortunately Google search restrict those sites. crazy Google company.
Yes they did I guess. May I’m one of the first victims. Though my site is not big but my visits dropped from 7000 yesterday to 3000 today.
I helpless and don’t know what went wrong.
@Rabin – how much of that is from search traffic?
@ Kevin Gibbons believe it or not 89%(analytics value) of my sites visitors are organic search traffic.
One more thing I’d like to share after I saw the page layout algorithm update on official google blog I changed my theme immediately. Before 70% of my “above the fold” was covered by AdSense ads. Now I have reduced it and looks like it already started working within few hours.
I’m not sure if this is happening for this update but it is. Hope some other will share their too.
Will someone please write an ad-blocker that blocks Google search result ads. I will promote it big time.
User-friendly approach of Google’s algorithm is always welcome but I don’t understand when Matt says that websites with less content above-the-fold will be affected. My concern is for Artist/Band/Music websites in which larger images and videos are displayed above-the-fold and this is also for better user experience! There is no other way to do this on such websites. Will these sites also be affected by this layout algorithm update. I’ll be glad to get an answer from Google in this regards and some tips that can help such websites perform better despite this update.
From what I am seeing this is definetely no part of the regular Panda update (yet). I have been wainting for a full update since the beginning of December and still no positive change for my Panda-affected main site.
I think the latest update which is fully focused on site lay out may be the part of latest google panda
The page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes” this statement clearly suggest that its not a Panda update
It’s getting increasing more difficult to get decent page ranking, they of course make it easier for themselves to increase their revenue from search ads whilst penalising everyone else! If you’ve got a new site where do you start?