We aren’t lying to you when we say that page layout and user experience matter, and Google is now taking a stand to better a user’s experience when they announced on their blog yesterday that sites that have excessive ads above the fold may not rank as highly as those with content or products easily visible to the consumer. They are taking complaints from users to heart when they say that scrolling to find content that they came to the page for makes for an unhappy experience.

So you’re an e-commerce store, and you probably don’t post ads and are wondering how this will affect you. Google doesn’t clearly state how they determine if an image is an ad, but based on some changes we’ve recently seen with clients I don’t believe this update is exclusive to advertisements. Posting an excessively large image at the top of your page could be read as spam, especially if all content and products are pushed below the fold. If you’ve seen ranking impacted by this update, try removing or reducing the size of the image you placed on that category page. Not sure how many people can see the content on your site? Google recommends you use their Browser Size tool.

If you’re thinking you might have been penalized by this update and make site changes, you’re not immediately out of hot water. Google points out that, as with any other update, when your site is reevaluated depends on how quickly they are able to re-crawl and process pages from your site. This can take several weeks, as speed depends on the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content (Google Search Blog ).