Is "Above the Fold Content" still a thing?
-
Many of our pages have the textual content stuffed at the bottom of the page because the manager doesn't think anybody reads it and it is an eyesore to have at the top: http://www.stevinsontoyotawest.com/schedule-service
For some light reading here is Google’s official blog talking about content quality:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html This references Ads vs Content showing above the fold. However, in our case it has to do with images vs ads and stuffing text at the bottom of pages.Here is a bit of heavier reading. You can do a quick search for "Fold" to see their interpretation.
http://macedynamics.com/research/content-quality-score/I understand that images are still content, however hardly any of the images have Alt text and they are not even named with keywords so Google really can't distinguish what the page is about through images alone. I'm not about to go through the entire site and add Alt text and rename images because I have much more to do on my plate.
So, the questions is: Is stuffing content at the bottom of the page, below all images/inventory/widgets ok to do or should we stick with the eyesore content at the top of the page? Thoughts?
-
I don't think you need to worry about it. I think what this blog was talking about is more people who do spam content way down the page under the footer kind of thing.
I think if you build a good website which has content below the fold I wouldn't be worried at all. I have clients who rank for some very hard keywords and for conversion we have less above the fold so it's pushing them to do one of our call to actions.
Always remember google wants you to build a website which users like not a website that google likes.
-
Hey Aaron,
I agree that if I add spammy content to any page that it will hurt rankings because I'm adding content to just add content. However, I don't agree that simply by forcing the content to the top (as Google suggests we do in the official Google Blog mentioned above) that it will hurt rankings. Like I said, the only issue is that my manager thinks it is an eyesore. I do think that if it is well worded and good content that people will end up reading it and learning more about what the page is about. The only thing I want to know is if the official Google blog post is still relevant as it was written in 2012. Structure, Design and UX have changed a lot since then. How big of a factor is Content Above the Fold vs Below in 2015?
-
always work off this. If you're putting content there because it's to help google than yes it's going to hurt you but if it's part of the website the design it's fine.
The sites i have seen be hit are ones where people have put content below the footer itself or it looks like spam.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content spamming risk
If some websites, which provide information about apps in a particular niche, are publishing the same content which we have given in our app's description when they refer our app for that particular niche then would it lead to spamming? Our website is getting a backlink from one such website so are we at any sort of risk? What should we do about it without having to lose that backlink?
Technical SEO | | Reema240 -
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
This is a follow up question to an earlier thread located here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/we-just-fixed-a-meta-refresh-unified-our-link-profile-and-now-our-rankings-are-going-crazy In that thread, Dr. Pete Meyers said "You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files." Our IT Director is willing to spend time working on this, but he believes it is a complicated process because each script must be evaluated to determine which ones are needed "pre" page load and which ones can be loaded "post." Our IT Director went on to say that he believes the quickest "win" we could get would be to move our SSL javascript for our SSL icon (in our site footer) to an internal page, and just link to that page from an image of the icon in the footer. He says this javascript, more than any other, slows our page down. My question is two parts: 1. How can I verify that this javascript is indeed, a major culprit of our page load speed? 2. Is it possible that it is slow because so many styles have been applied to the surrounding area? In other words, if I stripped out the "Secured by" text and all the syles associated with that, could that effect the efficiency of the script? 3. Are there any negatives to moving that javascript to an interior landing page, leaving the icon as an image in the footer and linking to the new page? Any thoughts, suggestions, comments, etc. are greatly appreciated! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Should i do "Article Marketing" for my quotes site?
Hello members, Should i do Article Marketing for my quote site to have quality backlinks to my site? will it improve my rankings?
Technical SEO | | rimon56930 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Hi Everyone, I ran into a problem I didn't know I had (Thanks to the seomoz tool) regarding duplicate content. my site is oxford ms homes.net and when I built the site, the web developer used php to build it. After he was done I saw that the URL's looking like this "/blake_listings.php?page=0" and I wanted them like this "/blakes-listings" He changed them with no problem and he did the same with all 300 pages or so that I have on the site. I just found using the crawl diagnostics tool that I have like 3,000 duplicate content issues. Is there an easy fix to this at all or does he have to go in and 301 Redirect EVERY SINGLE URL? Thanks for any help you can give.
Technical SEO | | blake-766240 -
301ed Pages Still Showing as Duplicate Content in GWMT
I thank anyone reading this for their consideration and time. We are a large site with millions of URLs for our product pages. We are also a textbook company, so by nature, our products have two separate ISBNs: a 10 digit and a 13 digit form. Thus, every one of our books has at least two pages (10 digit and 13 digit ISBN page). My issue is that we have established a 301 for all the 10 digit URLs so they automatically redirect to the 13 digit page. This fix has been in place for months. However, Google still reports that they are detecting thousands of pages with duplicate title and meta tags. Google is referring to these page URLs that I already have 301ed to the canonical version many months ago! Is there anything that I can do to fix this issue? I don't understand what I am doing wrong. Example:
Technical SEO | | dfinn
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=9780321676672
http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X As you can see the 10 digit ISBN page 301s to 13 digit canonical version. Google reports that they have detected duplicate title and meta tags between the two pages and there are thousands of these duplicate pages listed. To add some further context: The ISBN is just a parameter that allows us to provide content when someone searches for a product with the 10 or 13 digit ISBN. The 13 digit version of the page is the only physical page that exists, the 10 digit is only a part of the virtual URL structure of the website. This is why I cannot simply change the title and meta tags of the 10 digit pages because they only exist in the sense that the URL redirects to the 13 digit version. Also, we submit a sitemap every day of all the 13 digit pages so Google knows exactly what our physical URL structure is. I have submitted this question to GWMT forums and received no replies.0 -
Which pages to "noindex"
I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on. I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on: legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
Technical SEO | | mmaes
search results page
blog archive and category pages Thanks for any insight of this.0