Another SERPs Knowledge Layout - No Organic Above Fold

[aakk9999]

I have stumbled to another Google SERPs Knowledge layout connected with some country searches.

For a competitive searches with 3 AdWords ads there is no organic above the fold even on a big screens.

The example below shows what I see when I search for "camping France"

[i.imgur.com...]

Click on the country area links leads to another SERPs for searches focused to this country region.

Is this something new or has it been seen before?

[awall19]

I assume the yellow icon was the CTR winner out of whatever choices they had left that would satisfy the FTC.

Had to have been. They also tested other colors like green. And when the yellow icon was implemented, the other requirement of highlighting via a border & shading went away. Further the size of the "ad" label has shrunk since it was first tested.

Google does put a colored line at the bottom of some search results on mobile devices. And they put it both the ads and the organic search results, making some users think the organic search results are ads.

They also added extra whitespace between the ads and organic listings on mobile to further drive down the organic results on mobile, in much the same way larger page title / headline sizes on the desktop search results drive down the result set.

As ad heavy as Google is on mobile, the desktop search results on Yahoo! Search might even be a bit scarier.

One thing interesting about that yellow ad label is in some languages (like Spanish) it is a much wider label / longer word: "Anuncio" has anyone who manages large-scaled multilingual ad campaigns seen a click shift impact between the different languages with different label word sizes?

[roshaoar]

Same with skiing France for me. I think it's some sort of nationwide "leisure destinations" carousel experiment. Germany hiking, Italy snowboarding, UK sailing, US beaches all get the same carousel. Whether or not it also means no organic above the fold depends on whether adwords ads have been taken out.

Crikey, combine it with Google local and you get something pretty ugly -- try: earlswood west midlands sailing.

But, I don't think it's a very good carousel feature. The destinations show words under each location, and each location area is clickable. As a user you might then reasonably expect when clicking on one of those words underneath to go to a search for that word in that location, but it just goes to the generic location toplevel search. Not great for users imo.

[edited by: roshaoar at 10:40 am (utc) on Mar 17, 2015]

[Barbados]

Barbados
The main topic of this thread is cases in which the Google's organic results are pushed below the fold. We've already had many previous discussions about Knowledge Graphs and where the information in them comes from.

Thanks aristotle, duly noted. Sorry for going a bit off topic there....

[chewy]

Google moves the cheese once again.

Can anybody remark on what percent of searches (countries) etc this seems to be appearing?

Or does seem like just one of those zillions of A/B type tests?

[shri]

Someone from their "policy" team in the advertising section needs to call someone in the serps team and tell them that they're not allowed to push content down, with advertising. :)

[nickreynolds]

I wonder how succesful long term this will be for Google.Maybe i'm not an average user but I'm just conditioned now to ignore the cr+p at the top of the page and scroll down to the real results.
[edit - although actually i hardly ever use Google, I mainly use Bing which does generally give more results above the fold]

[Leosghost]

Same with skiing France for me. I think it's some sort of nationwide "leisure destinations" carousel experiment. Germany hiking, Italy snowboarding, UK sailing, US beaches all get the same carousel. Whether or not it also means no organic above the fold depends on whether adwords ads have been taken out.

Can anybody remark on what percent of searches (countries) etc this seems to be appearing?

Doesn't happen when searching in France using either g.com or g.fr, and using either French or English ( "preferred language" ) browser settings....

IMO they do it only where they think that they can do so without getting legislative "flack" over it..