Ad-Heavy Sites Will Be Penalized by Google Search Algorithm Update

Google has announced a ranking algorithm change that's going to trouble a few webmasters but for which regular users should be very thankful, it will start penalizing websites that shove a great deal of ads in front of the user, on top of the page, and push the content all the way down.

It's not hard to run into this types of sites, unfortunately, and for many of them, the content is not that great to begin with. Having them pushed down in the search results means that better quality sites have a better chance to rank even if their SEO is not as good.

"As we’ve mentioned previously, 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," Google's Matt Cutts wrote.

"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," he explained.

Cutts emphasizes that only sites that exaggerate in the practice will be hurt, ads above the fold are OK as long as they don't take up most of what the user sees. Sites with a lot of ads should be OK, as long as content is still visible and not hurt by the amount of ads.

The algorithm change only affects one percent of searches, meaning that not that many sites will be hurt, at least, not as many that rank well. However, Google won't provide a tool for websites to know whether or not they've reached the threshold.