Google Penalty World

From the article: "Similar to how last year’s Panda Update works, Google is examining sites it finds and effectively tagging them as being too ad-heavy or not.

If you’re tagged that way, you get a ranking decrease attached to your entire site (not just particular pages) as part of today’s launch.

If you reduce ads above-the-fold, the penalty doesn’t instantly disappear. Instead, Google will make note of it when it next visits your site. But it can take several weeks until Google’s “push” or “update” until the new changes it has found are integrated into its overall ranking system, effectively removing penalties from sites that have changed and adding them to new ones that have been caught."

From Google’s post on its Inside Search blog yesterday:

"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.

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.

Google also posted the same information to its Google Webmaster Central blog."

Read the full article: http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 

From the article:

"In a Google+ hangout video chat session, Matt Cutts clarified how Google’s above the fold penalization will work as many people was wondering if the number of ads will cause an issue, but that’s not the case.

The new algorithm inspects pages to see how much space is used to display advertisements above the fold, so it’s all about the size of ads, not actually the number of ads that are showing on the page.

A very interesting thing is Google will penalize the entire site if there is too much space used to display ads, especially above the fold.

Matt Cutts actually took two yellow stickies and put them on the top of a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and indicated that even if this space was just one big ad it is too much and could be impacted by Google’s new algorithm change."

Recommended.

Read the full article: http://www.famousbloggers.net/googles-above-the-fold-clarification.html 

(Curated by Robin Good)