Page layout algorithm improvement

In October 2012 Google has announced officially that it has updated the "Page Layout Algorithm" which was launched in January 2012.

When a user performs a search operation he wants to see the content right away in search results. The users are not happy if they didn't get the content immediately. So many complaints are coming in these days about this problem. The "Page Layout Algorithm" is an algorithm that helps us to find more quality sites in search results. It looks at the layout of a web page and the content when we click on the result.

Google doesn't want users to scroll down the page for the content; they want the content as quickly as possible. If our competitor site and our site have the same content and our competitor site has that content close to the top of the page and the users have to scroll down to find the content in our site, then there may be a chance that Google will give the importance to our competitor. So it affects the sites that don't have the content above the fold.

It's very common to place the ads above the fold for many websites, those ads also perform well. There is no affect of this algorithm change for the sites that place the ads to a normal degree, but it affects the sites that place ads to an extensive degree. It gets hard to find the actual content of the page if placing the ads goes much further. So this algorithm has the impact on the sites which have more ads above the fold or which have small amount of content above the fold. See the below figure.

According to Matt Cutts the initial January update of this algorithm had affected less than 1% of search queries globally and it affects English queries only. Matt Cutt said “If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly.”

If we want to know whether our website has been affected by the page layout algorithm then check how our website is displaying the content above the fold. For this we can use Browser Size Tool to see how our web page would look under different screen resolutions. Google has added this tool to analytics.


To check this tool in analytics, go to the content section - in-page analytics - browser size. This will display the page below the fold. If we want to know the percentage of visitors who can see the page, then click on anywhere on the screen or by controlling frequency using slider.

So it’s better to focus on delivering the best user experience on our websites rather than specific algorithm tweaks.