Google announced today on its official Inside Search blog that it will be changing its algorithm to help improve user experience. Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google stated in the official announcement, “we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience.” The changes announced today are only part of around 500 algorithm changes due to take place this year at the search giant.
Specifically Google will be looking at the proportion of advertisements above the fold compared to the amount of content, and how easy the content is to find on the page. The change won’t affect sites that use discretion with the number and placement of ads above the fold, “but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page, ” Cutts says.
Responses from the SEO community have been generally positive. Ray Grieselhuber, CEO of GinzaMetrics, an enterprise SEO company based in Mountain View, CA. stated in a post, “we care most about what we can learn from this to better reach our audience and provide useful content to them.”
The changes are only going to affect around 1 percent of all Google search results. If your site is affected by this change, Google’s suggestion is to “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”. Additional resources included for sites affected include Google’s free browser size tool, among others, to evaluate how their site appears on a variety of screen resolutions.