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
-
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
Is this duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content?
Hello, My question is: Is it duplicate content when there is a link back to the original content? For example, here is the original page: http://www.saugstrup.org/en-ny-content-marketing-case-infografik/. But that same content can be found here: http://www.kommunikationsforum.dk/anders-saugstrup/blog/en-ny-content-marketing-case-til-dig, but there is a link back to the original content. Is it still duplicate content? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JoLindahl912 -
Rel="no follow" for All Links on a Site that Charges for Advertising
If I run a site that charges other companies for listing their products, running banner advertisements, white paper downloads, etc. does it make sense to "no follow" all of their links on my site? For example: they receive a profile page, product pages and are allowed to post press releases. Should all of their links on these pages be "no follow"? It seems like a gray area to me because the explicit advertisements will definitely be "no followed" and they are not buying links, but buying exposure. However, I still don't know the common practice for links from other parts of their "package". Thanks
Technical SEO | | zazo0 -
One landing page with lots of content or content hub?
Interested in getting some opinions on if it's better to build one great landing page with tons of content or build a good landing page and build more content (as blog posts?) and interlink them back to the landing/hub page? Thoughts and opinions? Chris
Technical SEO | | sanctuarymg0 -
Block Quotes and Citations for duplicate content
I've been reading about the proper use for block quotes and citations lately, and wanted to see if I was interpreting it the right way. This is what I read: http://www.pitstopmedia.com/sem/blockquote-cite-q-tags-seo So basically my question is, if I wanted to reference Amazon or another stores product reviews, could I use the block quote and citation tags around their content so it doesn't look like duplicate content? I think it would be great for my visitors, but also to the source as I am giving them credit. It would also be a good source to link to on my products pages, as I am not competing with the manufacturer for sales. I could also do this for product information right from the manufacturer. I want to do this for a contact lens site. I'd like to use Acuvue's reviews from their website, as well as some of their product descriptions. Of course I have my own user reviews and content for each product on my website, but I think some official copy could do well. Would this be the best method? Is this how Rottentomatoes.com does it? On every movie page they have 2-3 sentences from 50 or so reviews, and not much unique content of their own. Cheers, Vinnie
Technical SEO | | vforvinnie1 -
How "Optimised" is my home page content
Good afternoon from 1 degrees C overcast frozen wetherby UK... I've made a number of on page html markup changes to optimise the page for steel suppliers steel stockholders but I'd like to know if there are any other on page improvments I could make for this page http://www.barrettsteel.com/ Im particulary concerned that contnet in in li tags and not p, could this be an issue? And finaaly on the home page a third party developer has slapped a header banner pointing to an external site know as woodberry tools, that cant be good can it? Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Duplicate content on my home
Hello, I have duplication with my home page. It comes in two versions of the languages: French and English. http://www.numeridanse.tv/fr/ http://www.numeridanse.tv/en/ You should know that the home page are not directories : http://www.numeridanse.tv/ Google indexes the three versions: http://bit.ly/oqKT0H To avoid duplicating what is the best solution?
Technical SEO | | android_lyon
Have a version of the default language? Thanks a lot for your answers. Take care. A.0 -
The Bible and Duplicate Content
We have our complete set of scriptures online, including the Bible at http://lds.org/scriptures. Users can browse to any of the volumes of scriptures. We've improved the user experience by allowing users to link to specific verses in context which will scroll to and highlight the linked verse. However, this creates a significant amount of duplicate content. For example, these links: http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1.5-10 http://lds.org/scriptures/nt/james/1 All of those will link to the same chapter in the book of James, yet the first two will highlight the verse 5 and verses 5-10 respectively. This is a good user experience because in other sections of our site and on blogs throughout the world webmasters link to specific verses so the reader can see the verse in context of the rest of the chapter. Another bible site has separate html pages for each verse individually and tends to outrank us because of this (and possibly some other reasons) for long tail chapter/verse queries. However, our tests indicated that the current version is preferred by users. We have a sitemap ready to publish which includes a URL for every chapter/verse. We hope this will improve indexing of some of the more popular verses. However, Googlebot is going to see some duplicate content as it crawls that sitemap! So the question is: is the sitemap a good idea realizing that we can't revert back to including each chapter/verse on its own unique page? We are also going to recommend that we create unique titles for each of the verses and pass a portion of the text from the verse into the meta description. Will this perhaps be enough to satisfy Googlebot that the pages are in fact unique? They certainly are from a user perspective. Thanks all for taking the time!
Technical SEO | | LDS-SEO0