6 ms·

Page layout algorithm improvement

71 points by avsaro 15y ago

cullenking 15y ago
This is right in line with last years announcement that Google will penalize slow sites. In my experience, there is significant overlap between slow load times and sites heavy on the banner ads...
nmcfarl 15y ago
I’m wondering how much this will alter http://experts-exchange.com http://experts-exchange.com 's rank. Although the questions are above the fold the vast majority of the content is well under the fold (for the purpose of hiding it, and getting you to pay.) It seems like this change is directly aimed at eliminating that tactic...
- tikhonj 15y ago
  It probably won't do them any good. And they're already doing poorly: I, at least, almost never see them anywhere near the top of my results. And I almost never bother scrolling down to later results either.
- llz 15y ago
  Experts Exchange was the first thing that came to my mind as well..
- nostromo 15y ago
  They've been in trouble for a few years: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.experts-exchange.com%2C+stackoverflow.com http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.experts-exchange.com...
Silhouette 15y ago
The first question that came to my mind was: How do they know what is an ad and what is just a heavily graphical site that is exactly what the user was looking for? If they're virtually rendering the page and looking at how much page area is covered by content from known ad networks (including Google Ads, I trust) then that's one thing. If they're looking for lots of nice, Google-friendly text and just discarding images, Flash, etc, then that's another thing entirely.
- avsaro 15y ago
  I do not think it is relevant to separating ads from useful content. They are probably just calculating place of content which is relevant to search keywords in the screen. This would works for images and other graphical content too.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  This is a solved-problem, every ad-blocking add-on already does this. I don't think Google of all companies is returning a lot of false positives in their algorithm.
- shabble 15y ago
  I wonder how much the in-house expertise of developing Chrome is contributing to the GoogleBot analysis stuff. Having people who aren't afraid to go knee deep in WebKit and produce some nice fast library for partially evaluating layouts, etc, is probably quite a nice thing. As one of the sibling comments here mentions, ad detection is a pretty well-solved problem by now, through size, position and origin matches. The interesting part here I think is how they're actually doing the 'virtual rendering' (and presumably, reflowing it for each of their mentioned typical browser resolutions) to check what's actually 'above the fold'.
  - joshu 15y ago
    i suspect that the cpu time to even partially render a page via webkit is really expensive at scale. that said, i recall there was a headless chrome that someone built - anyone remember where that is?
    - joshu 15y ago
      answered my own question: http://www.phantomjs.org/ http://www.phantomjs.org/
  - Chirono 15y ago
    | I wonder how much the in-house expertise of developing Chrome is contributing to the GoogleBot analysis stuff If anything, I expect the contribution worked the other way, with the rendering engine being developed purely for search, and then fleshed out into a full browser. There was an interesting post about this a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182579
Pound6F 15y ago
I think google is going about this the wrong way. They are claiming its a bad user experience for the search term to be down on the page or not have any content at the top but (1) that is far too generic a statement to make and (2) it is not Google's responsibility to make sure pages align to a certain design standard. They are essentially adding design requirements into their search algorithm. This restricts the design of any webpage that wants to optimize its Google ranking.
- TomGullen 15y ago
  This reads a bit like hyperbole, this is just another ranking factor in an ocean of ranking factors. To react to this news by redesigning all your sites using this ranking factor as your primary focus would be a mistake. Google's objective here is to reduce the ranking of bad quality ad ridden sites that attempt to serve as middle men between search results and a sale, low quality made for adsense sites. Anything google does to help rank these lower is good in my books.
  - Pound6F 15y ago
    Reducing ad ridden sites is great, but they are doing that in a roundabout way and taking down potentially useful sites in the process. The point is not that sites with ads at the top should be as high in the results as sites without ads, but that using such a high-level heuristic (as they claim) is a poor way to lower (or raise) the rank of a page. Google could also do a lot more work to show you WHERE on the page your search occurs. That would do a lot more to address the problem than just lowering the rank of pages where your search is lower on the page.
    - resnamen 15y ago
      Their instant preview feature tells you exactly that. The paragraph containing your search terms is marked by a red rectangle.
- mey 15y ago
  Ultimately Google is making a stand for user of it's search (Who they make money off of) by providing what the user wants. Which is easier and quicker access to information. If your primary business model is free content, ad supported, and rely on google as your search engine, you don't have much of a choice. Right or wrong, your business model is Google dependent, and you are held hostage. If you don't like that, it's time to find another business model. (Google being a monopoly is another issue, but no search engine is required to carry your content for discovery (yet, who knows what congress will throw at the wall next year))
TomGullen 15y ago
I like this change, and the way Google is headed.
mutagen 15y ago
What percentage of users is Google considering for 'above the fold' and are they just penalizing for ad content or do logos, images and header junk get penalized as well? For example, the WordPress TwentyEleven theme as seen in http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ shows the first article header at the 50% threshold, buried below the generous header and image banner. Would a site based on this theme or a similar design face a penalty?
WillyF 15y ago
Oddly enough, there are a lot of search results pages now that are more ads than content above the fold. Danny Sullivan does a nice job of illustrating the point here: http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-...
- avsaro 15y ago
  Danny Sullivan really makes a nice job however this usually is not the case, imo. Generally, Google's result page does not contain so much ad. In most cases which result page contain too much ad, ads might be even more relevant than natural results.
carlsednaoui 15y ago
As posted in one of the blog post's comments. I suggest you do this: - Open a new tab, google search "credit cards" and... ...all of your results, but one, are ads (I'm using a 11' MacBook air). My suggestion would be to do a tighter integration of Google's website user experience research into their search engine user experience design.
JangoSteve 15y ago
This is exactly why I've been using the Google Quick Scroll extension in Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjnmnbdibhgpbllgc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjn... Will this very negatively impact sites such as Twitter's Hogan JS? http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/ http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/
Too 15y ago
I hope this won't favor short sites where all the content fits above the fold compared to long, solid articles or q&a-site questions with several replies. Stackoverflow for example often requires scrolling to reach an answer because the question itself is so long.
- alexchamberlain 15y ago
  That shouldn't happen if the algorithm correctly understands ads verses content.
alexchamberlain 15y ago
I wonder how this will interact with responsive web design?
nader 15y ago
This will surely impact a lot of those typical adsense-optimized niche websites. In case you're interested I wrote a longer piece here: http://www.brandinfection.com/2012/01/20/google-improves-ranking-algorithm-now-looks-at-ad-placement/ http://www.brandinfection.com/2012/01/20/google-improves-ran...

71 points by avsaro 15y ago

This is right in line with last years announcement that Google will penalize slow sites. In my experience, there is significant overlap between slow load times and sites heavy on the banner ads...

nmcfarl 15y ago

I’m wondering how much this will alter http://experts-exchange.com http://experts-exchange.com 's rank. Although the questions are above the fold the vast majority of the content is well under the fold (for the purpose of hiding it, and getting you to pay.) It seems like this change is directly aimed at eliminating that tactic...

tikhonj 15y ago
It probably won't do them any good. And they're already doing poorly: I, at least, almost never see them anywhere near the top of my results. And I almost never bother scrolling down to later results either.
llz 15y ago
Experts Exchange was the first thing that came to my mind as well..
nostromo 15y ago
They've been in trouble for a few years: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.experts-exchange.com%2C+stackoverflow.com http://trends.google.com/websites?q=www.experts-exchange.com...

Silhouette 15y ago

The first question that came to my mind was: How do they know what is an ad and what is just a heavily graphical site that is exactly what the user was looking for? If they're virtually rendering the page and looking at how much page area is covered by content from known ad networks (including Google Ads, I trust) then that's one thing. If they're looking for lots of nice, Google-friendly text and just discarding images, Flash, etc, then that's another thing entirely.

avsaro 15y ago
I do not think it is relevant to separating ads from useful content. They are probably just calculating place of content which is relevant to search keywords in the screen. This would works for images and other graphical content too.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
This is a solved-problem, every ad-blocking add-on already does this. I don't think Google of all companies is returning a lot of false positives in their algorithm.
shabble 15y ago
I wonder how much the in-house expertise of developing Chrome is contributing to the GoogleBot analysis stuff. Having people who aren't afraid to go knee deep in WebKit and produce some nice fast library for partially evaluating layouts, etc, is probably quite a nice thing. As one of the sibling comments here mentions, ad detection is a pretty well-solved problem by now, through size, position and origin matches. The interesting part here I think is how they're actually doing the 'virtual rendering' (and presumably, reflowing it for each of their mentioned typical browser resolutions) to check what's actually 'above the fold'.
- joshu 15y ago
  i suspect that the cpu time to even partially render a page via webkit is really expensive at scale. that said, i recall there was a headless chrome that someone built - anyone remember where that is?
  - joshu 15y ago
    answered my own question: http://www.phantomjs.org/ http://www.phantomjs.org/
- Chirono 15y ago
  | I wonder how much the in-house expertise of developing Chrome is contributing to the GoogleBot analysis stuff If anything, I expect the contribution worked the other way, with the rendering engine being developed purely for search, and then fleshed out into a full browser. There was an interesting post about this a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182579

Pound6F 15y ago

I think google is going about this the wrong way. They are claiming its a bad user experience for the search term to be down on the page or not have any content at the top but (1) that is far too generic a statement to make and (2) it is not Google's responsibility to make sure pages align to a certain design standard. They are essentially adding design requirements into their search algorithm. This restricts the design of any webpage that wants to optimize its Google ranking.

TomGullen 15y ago
This reads a bit like hyperbole, this is just another ranking factor in an ocean of ranking factors. To react to this news by redesigning all your sites using this ranking factor as your primary focus would be a mistake. Google's objective here is to reduce the ranking of bad quality ad ridden sites that attempt to serve as middle men between search results and a sale, low quality made for adsense sites. Anything google does to help rank these lower is good in my books.
- Pound6F 15y ago
  Reducing ad ridden sites is great, but they are doing that in a roundabout way and taking down potentially useful sites in the process. The point is not that sites with ads at the top should be as high in the results as sites without ads, but that using such a high-level heuristic (as they claim) is a poor way to lower (or raise) the rank of a page. Google could also do a lot more work to show you WHERE on the page your search occurs. That would do a lot more to address the problem than just lowering the rank of pages where your search is lower on the page.
  - resnamen 15y ago
    Their instant preview feature tells you exactly that. The paragraph containing your search terms is marked by a red rectangle.
mey 15y ago
Ultimately Google is making a stand for user of it's search (Who they make money off of) by providing what the user wants. Which is easier and quicker access to information. If your primary business model is free content, ad supported, and rely on google as your search engine, you don't have much of a choice. Right or wrong, your business model is Google dependent, and you are held hostage. If you don't like that, it's time to find another business model. (Google being a monopoly is another issue, but no search engine is required to carry your content for discovery (yet, who knows what congress will throw at the wall next year))

TomGullen 15y ago

I like this change, and the way Google is headed.

mutagen 15y ago

What percentage of users is Google considering for 'above the fold' and are they just penalizing for ad content or do logos, images and header junk get penalized as well? For example, the WordPress TwentyEleven theme as seen in http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ shows the first article header at the 50% threshold, buried below the generous header and image banner. Would a site based on this theme or a similar design face a penalty?

WillyF 15y ago

Oddly enough, there are a lot of search results pages now that are more ads than content above the fold. Danny Sullivan does a nice job of illustrating the point here: http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-...

avsaro 15y ago
Danny Sullivan really makes a nice job however this usually is not the case, imo. Generally, Google's result page does not contain so much ad. In most cases which result page contain too much ad, ads might be even more relevant than natural results.

carlsednaoui 15y ago

As posted in one of the blog post's comments. I suggest you do this: - Open a new tab, google search "credit cards" and... ...all of your results, but one, are ads (I'm using a 11' MacBook air). My suggestion would be to do a tighter integration of Google's website user experience research into their search engine user experience design.

JangoSteve 15y ago

This is exactly why I've been using the Google Quick Scroll extension in Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjnmnbdibhgpbllgc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjn... Will this very negatively impact sites such as Twitter's Hogan JS? http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/ http://twitter.github.com/hogan.js/

Too 15y ago

I hope this won't favor short sites where all the content fits above the fold compared to long, solid articles or q&a-site questions with several replies. Stackoverflow for example often requires scrolling to reach an answer because the question itself is so long.

alexchamberlain 15y ago
That shouldn't happen if the algorithm correctly understands ads verses content.

alexchamberlain 15y ago

I wonder how this will interact with responsive web design?

nader 15y ago

This will surely impact a lot of those typical adsense-optimized niche websites. In case you're interested I wrote a longer piece here: http://www.brandinfection.com/2012/01/20/google-improves-ranking-algorithm-now-looks-at-ad-placement/ http://www.brandinfection.com/2012/01/20/google-improves-ran...