"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."
They seem to say here that there are two ways to be penalized..
- not a lot of visible content above the fold
- large portion above the fold is all PPC ads
The other question is what screen size are they using to determine "above the fold"? Monitors are becoming larger but most sites are still developed with 1024 x 760 pixel screens.
What I find somewhat ironic about this new Google algo change is Google Search doesn't seem to follow it's own rules. The screen shot below I grabbed is from a 1024 X 764 display size. Noticed the red -X-out areas are all PPC advertisements above the fold. At least 50% of the screen space is PPC ads. :-) If you pull out all the white space in the header it is even worse.
BTW, I think it is great that Google will use this to help reduce high rankings for web pages stuffed full of PPC ads (including Google AdSense). But, will inbound links continue to trump lack of visible content above the fold?
