TravMonkey in Google's browser size tool
Have you placed most of your advertisements above the fold on your website?
Do you have a large unnecessary header at the top of your blog? It’s just become a little more important to think about your travel blogs design from your users point of view. Google has announced that it will be penalising websites that have too many ads above the fold.
Page Layout Algorithm Update
The “page layout algorithm” change targets websites where the content is hard to find. It’s important that your content is visible to your users above the fold, you can use Google’s browser size tool to see what content is visible to your users:
“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.” – Google’s Webmaster Central Blog
Unnecessary Headers & Poor Ad Placement
I often see travel websites with huge headers that often don’t serve a purpose. The header takes up valuable space on the page that could be displaying the rich content that users are looking for.
If you don’t need a large header it might be worth thinking about replacing it with a smaller version in order to improve the user experience. It’s also increasingly important to pay extra attention to where you are placing your ads and content, your user experience should always come first.
I checked a couple of travel blogs with Google’s browser size tool and did find that in many cases the sites were restricting the amount of content visible by having a huge header and logo.
Google is continuously improving it’s algorithm to identify poorly designed page layouts that are ad heavy. It’s often cited how important quality content is but it’s often forgotten that the user experience is also a major factor in the quality of your website. This quality is one of many metrics that Google are increasingly looking for when ranking web pages.
