Google just made an adjustment to their page layout algorithm that could affect your business website SEO.  This new change is designed to offer a better experience for visitors to your site which is the top priority for Google.  While it is estimated to only affect approximately 1% of websites, we suspect the number to be considerably larger.

The reason for this change is that Google has realized that sites with certain layouts get far more “bounces” than other sites.  A bounce is when someone clicks to your site from a search result and then leaves without taking any further action (clicks a link, clicks a button, watches a video, opts in, etc.).  A bounce tells Google that the website probably was not valuable for the visitor.

Why does Google care?

Google’s entire model centers around the quality of their search engine.  If the search engine isn’t delivering good results for searchers, then people will quit using it and instead go to Bing or some other search engine.  Because of this, Google is our friend, not our enemy.  Can you imagine how life would be if you couldn’t quickly search and find what you wanted online?  Chaos…

What should a business website have in order to comply?

It is pretty simple – have valuable content “above-the-fold.”  Above-the-fold is a phrase used to describe the first thing someone sees when they land on a website, before they have to scroll down the page (see image to the right). Offending sites often are littered with ads and banners for other offers, making the visitor have to search around for the actual information they were searching for in the first place.  Quality sites put their content first so that a visitor can easily get to it when they land on the page.

To see the Google update by Matt Cutts visit:  http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html