Google’s newest algorithm will penalise websites where content is hard to find among a sea of advertisements.
The new search calculation will not direct users to sites that are overstuffed with advertising, rather it will take them to sites where content is paramount and clear. Google’s Matt Cutts said that they did not want searchers to be bombarded with adverts and find themselves struggling to find the content they wanted.
“Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away,” Cutts wrote in the company’s announcement. “So sites that don’t have much content ‘above-the-fold’ can be affected by this change.”
The change is likely to only have noticeable effects on less than one per cent of all global searches and Cutts emphasised that it was still ok to place ads above the fold – just, as he put it, “to a normal degree”.
The change is one of around 500 “improvements” to its algorithms that Google plans to roll out this year, according to Cutts, and he said that webmasters should not get too bogged down with making changes to suit the small algorithm changes.
