Google is on an algorithm refresh spree it seems. There is an update being rolled out every week it and the latest one is a Refresh of its Page Layout Algorithm, which was first launched in January 2012.
The roll out was announced by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team on Twitter. He said in his Tweet that the refresh is minor and will only noticeably affect 0.7% of English queries.
Google when rolling out the algorithm said that they were coming down on sites which had too many ads above the fold. Google said, “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. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change.”
This refresh will now come on heavy with sites that have multiple ads placed on their sites above the fold- so much so that content can be found after scrolling down the entire page.
Updates Launched in the last couple of weeks
Google has rolled out updates one after another since the last few weeks. And this is what we have:
- Panda refresh on the 27th of September
- The EMD update on the 28th of September
- New Penguin Update on the 5th of October
- Page Layout Refresh on the 9th of October
Looks like Google is going the old way and rolling out many refreshes during the festive season. What do you think? Have you seen any ranking fluctuations yet after the Page Layout Refresh?
Navneet Kaushal
@navneetkaushal
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