Above The Fold?

[Brett_Tabke]

What is the current consensus on how Google detects too many ads above the fold?

[gehrlekrona]

Not sure, but for one site I was asked to put some more ads above the fold to make more money by the AdSense team. Go figure....

[LostOne]

Doesn't matter..being cynical again. I see that adsense reminder stuff from Gorg all the time. BUT, every site will be be different? In my case I have left side nav at 200 pixels and a right hand side leader board with adsense in it with the remaining content in the center.

Fixed container at 1025 or sumthing like that. About 200 words on average in 1024 x 768 show above the fold. One additional small ad in the left nav about 300 pixels below the header. Nothing else until well below the fold.

But then what is considered above the fold. New notepads change all that don't they?

[1script]

I'd vote for "doesn't matter", too. With one caveat tho: if it looks really awful, it'll probably get you through a manual action by a human reviewer. I don't believe it ever was an issue algorithmically, only if your site would bubble up for a human review, because the reviewers are extremely ads-avert. Even they, I sense, have been trained to give sites a bit more leeway with ads lately.

[indyank]

What is the current consensus on how Google detects too many ads above the fold?

I am not sure what the consensus is but I am sure it is not a per page factor but a site wide factor. So if you have a good percentage of pages on your site without ads or without too many ads above fold, you can slip through this filter.


I have also head stories of websites escaping this filter by having ads other than adsense above fold, as they don't seem to get counted most of time..

[edited by: indyank at 4:59 pm (utc) on Aug 27, 2012]

[netmeg]

Yea that's the thing; I dunno where the fold is. I know for my sites, I did move to a larger ad, but I put it where was maybe just on the edge of the fold for most normal desktops these days. As far as I can tell, it hasn't hurt anything (and earnings are up). But it's below the site name and the navigation and the tagline; I don't think I'd feel comfortable putting it at the very top.

[Andem]

I think that the ATF is more of a user interaction metric than a real Google metric. Their PR team really does a great job at getting everybody's knickers in a twist.

In my own experience with a site which was launched a couple of months ago into beta, having no ads at all improves user interaction and reduces the bounce rate. I'd imagine that if there were ads, a leaderboard above the fold would have a negative effect. Actually, we did have a leaderboard image advertising our launch as a placeholder above-the-fold: removing it decreased the bounce rate.

Consistently low bounce rates and good user interaction numbers have seen our traffic increase every day, more or less, for the past 50 days.

[londrum]

there is a topic on here at the moment to do with about.com. i hadn't looked at it for ages so i had a look to be nosey. they seem to get away with a ton of ads above the fold.

looking at a typical article, i can see 4 different ad blocks all showing above the fold -- a 728x60 leaderboard, a square block on the lefthand side, and 2 more big square blocks on the righthand side -- and they are all adsense as well. the actual content is squeezed into a central column that takes up no more than a third of the width

google doesn't seem to be punishing that site. so maybe its got less to do with the number and position of the ads, and more to do with whether it turns away visitors. presumably About.com's visitors dont mind too much, otherwise it wouldn't have sold for $300 million

[alika]

Has anyone of those affected by the above the fold algorithm back in January ever recovered? If so, what changes did you make?

[indyank]

google doesn't seem to be punishing that site. so maybe its got less to do with the number and position of the ads, and more to do with whether it turns away visitors. presumably About.com's visitors dont mind too much, otherwise it wouldn't have sold for $300 million

but are you sure they have above the fold ads on all pages of their site? They can still get away by not having them everywhere...

[deadsea]

My site hasn't recovered any traffic since January. I just switched over from just Adsense to Google DFP to serve my ads. So far, that hasn't made any difference either.

When I've had the ear of some Google employees (that don't work in search or have any inside knowledge about the above the fold algorithm) they say that its the content to ad ratio that matters. In my case, Googlebot is likely seeing my content as a "call to action" rather than content because it isn't text, image, or flash. Rather I have form and javascript content.

In my case, I have simply adjusted my expectations and moved on. I'm still hopeful that Google lifts this penalty for me, but I'm not expecting it.

[tedster]

From what I can see, they come at the issue from the opposite angle - measuring the CONTENT and it's visibility more than the number of area taken up by ads. In fact I had a look at one site that was hit and the clickable boxes above the fold were NOT ads, but rather features elsewhere on the site.

The problem I saw was that they were on both the left and right sides and the center column (where the content was) tended to be dwarfed in visibility.