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Back in November, Google revealed that it was testing algorithm changes that would examine what appears “above the fold” on web pages. It raised a number of questions about the kinds of hoops webmasters would have to jump through.
Last week, the changes were officially announced as the “Page Layout” update, which looks at the layout of a page and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.
Was your site impacted by the Page Layout or “above the fold” update?   Let us know in the comments.
Upon announcing the update, Google “Distinguished Engineer” Matt Cutts wrote:
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. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.