Peter Bowen, Managing Director at First One On asks the question “do you remember when a website could be designed any way you wanted and it did not occur to us that it would make much difference how the content was laid out?” – until Google decided that the layout of the content on a page was very important and it really does make a difference. And design does matter. For instance Google says that if there is no substantial content above the “fold” – then there is a chance that this could impact on the ranking of the page in a search result.
The “fold” is considered to be what you can see when the page first loads without scrolling down the page to see further content on that page. It’s much like looking at a folded newspaper – what you see at the top of the page is the important stuff and it’s that content that Google says is important to the way in which content is indexed.
Last week, Matt Cutts announced that Google has implemented a further change to the Page layout Algorithm that was first launched in January 2012, that specifically targets and gives extra credit to pages that have significantly more content above the “fold”.
Essentially what this means is that Google wants users to be able to see valuable content at the top of the page without having to scroll down to see it. Google wants users to be able to get to the content quickly without having to wade through lots of pretty graphics and other design elements that are at the top of the page to get to the content. What this means is that if two different websites have similar content that is of value to the user then the page that has a better layout of content at the top of the page is more likely to rank higher than a page that the user has to scroll down to see the content.
There has been a lot of discussion about the impact of the Page Layout Algorithm and many designers have taken the view that the visual image and commonplace sliders that we are now quite familiar with are an essential part of the masthead of the page. But designers beware, Google is on the prowl again and giving more credit to website page layouts that conform to the search engine’s criteria for content comes first.
One very important thing to remember here is that Google in it’s infinite wisdom is only trying to make the search results reflect what users want – to be able to get to the content of what they were searching for in the first place quickly, without having to scroll down past all of the sometimes annoying image distractions to get to the content – the real meat that either answers the question that they were searching for or waffles on and they hit the go back button and are gone forever. In the future such sites may not rank as well as they did before because they don’t conform to what Google wants to see.
