Google's Above The Fold Update - What About Below The Fold?

[deepsand]

Well, the way in which Google organizes the world's information, makes it accessible and useful, does affect their bottom line so I agree with you on that.

Also with respect to this particular part of the subject, as keyon said, a big part of this has to do with ads. If there was an ulterior motive by Google here, why would they want to affect their ads on websites? Maybe you're right; maybe they'd prefer more professional/easy-on-the-eyes (NOT made for ads sites) so as to increase quality clicks on their ads.

Of course there's an ulterior motive; Google is wholly dependent on its ad revenues for maintaining shareholder value.

Google is an advertising firm, masquerading as an IT services provider.

[murphypj]

Ok. I give up.

"Content is king". Design each page to be user-friendly and with as much content for the subject of the page as you can present to the user.

Oh no, GWT is now telling you off because you're page is slower than 73% of other pages. Yeah, because I put the effort in than 73% of other competitors didn't, to improve my users options for finding content they will enjoy on the page subject.

A few short weeks ago, we were told to look deep into our souls/pages and remove or combine pages which were low on content. Ironically enough, these pages would have had most of their content 'above the fold'.

Apart from the very obvious fact that a search bot can have no way of determining what is or isn't 'above the fold', given the huge variety of screen sizes available to users, and that this definition can in any case be changed with the flick of a CSS setting, it is in the natural order of things for some pages to have content which extends way below the initially visible portion of any screen, and for others to have just a small amount of content.

I can only imagine the worries of commercial webmasters who just have lots of products in a particular category, where most of the content is BTC. Do they paginate? Will this mean that the first item on page 7 will be seen as more 'relevant' than the 6th item on page 1? Do they try to sub-categorize, when they know this makes no sense?

Mine is a hobbyist site for guitar players. My pages for popular artists have maybe a hundred items, for less popular artists maybe 5 or 6. So I displease the Google Gods on both counts - too much content below the cut, and too little content.

So, do I split my Bob Dylan page into seperate Bob Dylan, Robert Allen Zimmerman etc. pages, and at the same time combine ten of my lower content pages into one ( with some record-breaking Title, Description tags )?

Emm... NO. I give my visitors the content they want in the format that best suits their needs.

I appreciate (kinda) that Google has a whispered engagement with website owners, and I appreciate ( greatly ) that I can tap into the expertise on this forum.

I have believed for some time now, reading all of the concerns here, that G is making changes and fomenting panic, with the sole aim of killing SEO and forcing businesses to pay for their ads. Their revenue from Google ads on informational sites like mine is so minor that they put little or no effort in the algo to ensure relevance in searches for non sales based terms.

Like Morestar, I have always had 'footer' info and navigation on all of my pages, and I agree with WilliamC's "Smoke and Mirrors" evaluation of this latest 'whisper'.