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Google’s Latest Algorithm Change – Above the Fold

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If you’ve been paying attention to us the past year or purchased Feeding the Panda from us you would know that Google’s latest change came as no surprise to us – in fact we have been talking about it for almost a year now. Now we’re not saying that to toot our own horn here, but rather to illustrate to you one of our core beliefs – effective SEO is not hard nor is it mysterious. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit, so let’s back up.

In the past few days Google released another significant algorithm change. Now, it’s not nearly as big as the Panda algorithm change that affected as many as 12% of searches. In contrast this latest algo change only affects about 1% of the searches, but it is still significant. So, what’s it all about?

 

 

Above the Fold

Google is getting more creative and more sophisticated in its abilities to parse content and identify the real content on the page and the fluff (sidebar text, widgets, etc…). This will continue to evolve over time so that Google can give more preferential treatment to the higher quality content on the page.

This algorithm change – introduced on 1/19/2012 – is all about analyzing the amount of content that is presented to the user above the fold. So what does above the fold mean? It’s an old term that goes back to the days of newspapers (hey, remember those you Kindle luving, iPad huggers – LOL). In terms of a newspaper, above the fold meant that your story appeared above the fold mark of the paper (half way down). It was always desirable to have your story placed above the fold to get maximum exposure.

In the Internet space, above the fold means the content that shows on your page before you click on the vertical scroll bar or page down. So when you first open up your website in a maximized window, the content that shows up is considered to be “above the fold”.

Now it’s not quite that simple in the virtual world because there really is no “standard” screen resolution. Some have old screens and are using 800 x 600 resolution and others like me have dual 27” monitors in high resolution. So the “fold line” is a bit tough to really nail down, but for general purposes you should consider an area of 900 pixels wide by about 500 pixels high to be the “above the fold” region of your site. According to Google, that area covers about 90% of the users online.

Why is this important?

Well it’s really pretty simple. You see, despite all of the BS out there about how Google keeps changing its algorithms and turning the Internet upside down, the reality is, they’ve been remarkably consistent and it’s not too hard to see what’s coming. In fact, if you listen, they tell you.

So why do most people think that Google algorithms and SEO are so mysterious? The reason is that is because most people are trying to game the system and rather than focus on solid long term SEO strategies, they choose to employ short term tactics that are here today and gone tomorrow – building the foundation of their site on quicksand and hoping to outwit Google (hint: they have a lot of PhD’s working for them, you’re not likely to win this battle).

Here’s an example of what I mean – tactics versus strategy. A long term strategy is to target appropriate keywords, build links for them in a conservative manner and write high quality and engaging content. But let me tell you about this one tactic a guy was using and trying to “sell” as the latest tactic d’ jour. He was getting all of his traffic from blog commenting – all of it. He had all kinds of Google Alert’s setup on his keywords and looking at specific high traffic sites and the moment a new post would hit he would scurry over to the site like a rat after cheese and quickly throw up a blog comment with a prominent link back to his site.

Now, he was pretty good at it and pretty good at stirring up controversy and leaving interesting comments that got clicks. In fact, he was driving some pretty serious traffic to his site from these comments. But, then it happened – he got sick and wasn’t able to work at such a frantic pace. His traffic fell off over 90% in just a couple of weeks.

He hadn’t focused on the strategy of listbuilding and providing quality content on his site or building rapport with his readers – he was just chasing the quick buck. So when his short sighted traffic strategy fell apart, we was left holding the bag.

This algorithm update is something Google has been talking about for a very long time – providing a good user experience by displaying textual content above the fold. Now Google has been warning us about this for at least a couple of years and now they are finally starting to apply tweaks to their algorithm to actually penalize your rankings if you don’t listen.

The Logic Behind the Problem

Google wants to provide the best possible result to its users (your customers that are searching). To do that, they want to make sure that when a user clicks on a site in the search result pages that they are immediately taken to relevant content about the subject they searched on and not forced to scroll down through three or four pages of ads, banners, adsense blocks, fancy flash animations and image sliders in order to get to the real content that they were searching for.

That only makes sense and if you stop and try to just think like Google a bit, you’ll realize that much of the algorithm changes are nothing out of line nor are they generally very surprising. More often than not they are simply iterations toward the same goals that have been publicly disclosed for years. Have you heard them talking about social media the past few months? Well, it shouldn’t surprise you when future shifts rely more and more on having a solid social media presence for your site (consider yourself warned).

So, what do you do about it?

Well, take a look at your site and ask yourself the obvious question – do I have enough textual content as the primary, above the fold focus of my design? If you don’t then you need to start taking some steps to make improvements. Mike and I have needed to do this on our sites for a long time. This site for example needs a header that is about half as tall and less dead white space above the top five rankings.

To get a great look at your site as it is seen in different resolutions, take a lot at this terrific free tool by, none other, than Google itself.

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

This tool will allow you to navigate to your site and it will super impose a chart over the top of your site in a semi-transparent method so you can see what parts of your site are appearing. For example, here is how it appears on my large widescreen monitor.

 

Here’s a quick checklist of items you should consider evaluating on your site design.

• Site Header – Is it too thick and wasting too much vertical space? The taller your site header image is the further it pushes content down below the fold.
• Navigation Bar – Are you using a double tiered navigation bar? You know, the kind that has two rows of links? That just adds to a thick header and you should consider redesigning it and putting some of those links into the footer instead.
• Too many ads – If you have too many ads above the fold that just screams at Google – trust me, not in a good way. You need to reexamine your layout and see if you can shift some around to get more content above the fold.
• Big Image Sliders – These have become all the rage, but you need to really consider how you use them. If you’re not careful your above the fold view will have nothing but a header, sidebar ads and an image slider – seriously, that’s what a lot of sites look like, especially in lower resolution.

So, is that an exhaustive list? No, I’m sure there are a couple of other things you could do as well, but that will help you get the most of them fixed. Lastly, one thing you may wish to consider – another way to “skin the cat” so to speak – is to perhaps increase the width of your site. If the width is larger then you can fit more content in above the fold. Look at your design in Google’s Browsersize Tool and play with it a bit until you get the right result you’re looking for.

Summary

There are really two separate points that I’ve tried to make in this post. One is about the new algorithm and what you need to do about it, but the reality is that there is a larger more important topic that I’m trying to bring to attention here and that is that you need to really get into Google’s head a bit and focus your site’s objectives on long term strategies that work. Hopefully the message has come through…

 

Tags: above the fold, google alert ideas, what does above the fold mean