Is Your Webpages' Content Above the Fold?
Google's latest change could hurt your page rankings if a lot of your content is below the fold!
by Dave Maloney
On their neverending mission to make our online experience more productive by providing the most helpful search results, Google recently announced an update to their algorithm that targets your page layouts. While Google Preview helps users scan a search result to pinpoint exactly where the relevant text is on that page, what they're looking for may still be difficult to find on a long and cluttered page. This usually ends up with the user abandoning the page and returning to the search results to search some more. Google wants to help ease some of that frustration and improve our experience by lowering the rankings of guilty sites.
What does "Above the Fold" and "Below the Fold" mean?
The "fold" is the cutoff point where you have to scroll down to see the bottom section of a webpage (think of a newspaper folded in half - remember newspapers?) All your page content above the fold has an extremely better chance of being seen and read than any content below the fold. It's sad but true, no one really wants to read or work any more than they have to, and that includes having to scroll down through too much information to find something.
You may want to update your page layout to prioritize your content, with the important pieces highest on the page above the fold and leave less critical content below the fold. Ideally, you should have as little below the fold as possible, but a funny thing about the fold - it's different on pretty much every monitor! Google provides a Browser Size Tool that you can enter in your URL to get an idea of how other people see your page on their screen. The percentage numbers within the cutoff lines indicate how many percent of Google users can see at least that much of your page.
Google's update is mainly aimed at sites who have a lot of advertisements at the top of their pages, which force their visitors to scroll down below the fold to find the real reason why they came to that page. But, if you have a big Flash intro or a lot of images covering the top of your page, while it may be visually appealing, it could be hurting you if you're visitors are clicking on through your pages beacause they're not quickly seeing what they want.
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