Google announced this week they have launched a change to their algorithm, more specifically the part of their algorithm that looks over the page layout and determines how much actual content you see when you land on it.

Google has been receiving complaints from users that they’re unhappy when they click on a link in the search results and have difficulty finding the actual content on the page. Users don’t want to have to scroll through a bunch of ads to see the content they’re looking for, they want the content to appear immediately.

Pages With Little Content Above The Fold Will Be Penalized

This algorithm change will affect pages that are cluttered with ads above the fold without providing much in the way of actual content. Google says this is not a good user experience and sites with pages like this may not rank as highly from now on.

Google understands that placing ads above the fold is common and actually quite helpful for webmasters trying to make money from their site, so they won’t penalize sites that have a “normal degree” of ads above the fold. In other words, as long as you go easy on the ads at the top of the page and display mostly content, this change won’t affect you.

Some good news here is that not many sites will be affected. Matt Cutts says the algorithm change will noticeably affect less than 1% of searches globally, which equates to less than 1 in 100 searches

How To Avoid A Penalty

If you believe your website has been affected, or may be hit by this penalty in the near future, consider rearranging the layout of your pages so the content above the fold is easy for users to see quickly. Google offers a tool to compare how your site looks on various screen sizes, so you can ensure there’s plenty of content for users to see above the fold regardless of what kind of screen they’re on.

If you do rearrange your pages, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as soon as Google crawls your site again and sees the difference. How long that will take depends on the number of pages on your site and how easily your site is for Google to crawl. Google says this will take several weeks for a typical website.

This change is just one of the over 500 improvements Google is expected to roll out to search this year.