Google has again jolted webmasters and site owners with its new update which is said to be known as “Top Heavy 2” or another “Above the Fold” update! Yes, this morning Google’s head of the webspam team, Matt Cutt twitted an algo update that is targeted to push down sites in google search results that do not show any valuable content in the top side of the page (or the area that a visitor can see without scrolling).
Matt Cutt has tweeted “Minor weather report: Update of goo.gl/OpIDL launching today. ~0.7% of English queries noticeably affected”
This is second update in last two weeks, prior to today’s Top Heavy 2 update, Google came up with an EMD (Exact Match Domain) updated target at bringing down low quality exact match domain sites – low quality websites that are having keyword in their domain.
Top Heavy update is just an extended version!
Prior to launching Top Heavy 2 update, Google had another version of such update which was released in January earlier this year. The original post to the Top Heavy announcement can be found on Google’s offical blog about the Page Layout algorithm from January.
Why Google launched Top Heavy update?
When Google launched this update earlier this year, they stated it very clearly that they want to give their users a better experience. They also gave reason in details behind this update stating that they receive many complaints from users that if they (users) click on a result in SERP and if it’s difficult to find the actual content, then users are not happy with the search experience. That’s why Google thought that useful and valuable content should be visible to users without scrolling down the page. That’s what Google says Above the Fold content.
Basic idea is that a user should not need to scroll down to bottom of the page or to invisible area of the browser. Sites which shows valuable content in the visible area are treated as good quality, user friendly websites and are given good value in SERP by Google’s search algorithms.
Chance to survive
Those who have affected by this update can have a chance to survive if they follow Google’s guidelines and recommendations. They first need to update their website’s structure and should put valuable content on top side (to what Google says ‘Above the fold area’). Once they are done, Google may crawl their sites in few weeks, depending on size and structure of the site and thus they may be given a chance to survive.
Many search engine optimisation professionals and webmasters have started updating their websites and now they are hoping for Google to restore their rankings. If your site too is affected, first try to apply Google’s recommendations and then check if it is regaining its ranking in SERP. Share your thoughts on today’s algorithms update in below comment box and let us know what do you think about Google’s way to give its users a better experience!
