As a business owner with a website to manage, keeping up to date with the seemingly endless number of Google updates can be a source of stress, often unnecessarily, and Google’s latest refresh/update to its algorithms, the ‘Top Heavy algorithm’, is no exception.
Matt Cutts, the head of search spam at Google, recently announced in a tweet that Google has refreshed its ‘page layout algorithm’– SEO folks: we recently launched a refresh of this algorithm: http://goo.gl/3yk0Xo Visible to outside world on ~Feb. 6th. – and naturally, business owners, webmasters and SEO agencies are concerned about how these changes could negatively impact upon their business interests.
The Top Heavy Algorithm :
The Top Heavy algorithm is designed to downgrade the search engine ranking of webpages with an excessive amount of ads at the top of the page, along with web pages that contain ads that Google deems to be overly distracting.
Whilst this algorithm refresh is meant to enhance user experiences – many users have complained about poor user experiences due to excessive or irrelevant advertising – what does this mean for you as a business owner with a business website to manage?
This will depend on your web pages, their content, the number of ads they feature and the nature of those ads, so there’s quite a lot to take into account when endeavoring to assess whether your business website will be affected.
Basically, these algorithm changes are designed to result in better user experiences – by targeting excessive advertising that detracts from user experiences – so you should consider the advertisement-to-content ratio on your website and ensure your web pages feature more relevant content than they do advertisements.
It’s also interesting to note Google announced that non-English language websites would be affected more so than English language websites, most notably Arabic and Russian, though no specific answer was given as to why this was the case.
Has Your Website been Affected?
As there’s still quite a lot of speculation concerning exactly what Google is targeting with the Top Heavy algorithm changes, a good way to ascertain whether or not your website has been affected by the changes is to check your website’s analytics data with the aim of ascertaining what changes have taken place after February 6; the date the algorithm changes took place.
However, Matt Cutts has also mentioned that less than one percent of searches would be affected by the changes. Therefore, there’s actually a very slim chance your business website would be affected, provided that it isn’t top heavy with ads with the result that when users enter your website they immediately find, what Google deems to be, an insufficient amount of content to deliver a satisfying user experience.
Nevertheless, if you believe your website has been affected by the recent algorithm changes, Matt Cutts suggests that you take into consideration how the area above-the-fold on your web pages is used and whether the content on your web pages is difficult to distinguish quickly or obscured by advertisements.
Furthermore, he also suggests using Google’s browser size and screen resolution tools to see how your web pages would appear using different screen resolutions.
How has it Affected SEO?
In a Google press release that addresses the algorithm changes in relation to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Google reports that there have been very few complaints from SEO interests around the date the algorithm changes took place.
This, Google claims, “suggests it impacted fewer sites than when Google updates other filters like the Panda or Penguin algorithms.”
If your business uses SEO techniques to enhance the visibility of your website it would be advisable to check your website’s analytics data to see if any changes have taken place and to also contact the Best London Digital Marketing Agency to discuss whether or not there’s actually a need to make changes to the way you manage your SEO campaign.
However, at the present point in time these changes haven’t appeared to affect search engine optimization interests, so there’s a good chance that you have nothing to worry about in this regard.
Whilst it’s important to be aware of these algorithm changes, if you haven’t noticed any changes after checking your website’s analytics data there’s a good chance you have nothing to fear.
