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In January 2012, Google announced the page layout penalty and then updated it in October 2012, it basically sets to penalize sites with too many ads, too much in the way of your organic content.
As I covered at Search Engine Land, the question was posed to Google's Matt Cutts about Google penalizing their search results page because there are so many AdWord ads pushing down the organic search results.
Matt responded two ways, the second more interesting:
(1) Google doesn't index their own search results.
(2) If they did, the ad to organic results ratio and layout would not trigger a page layout penalty.
Got that? That is a good benchmark.
Here is a rough sketch of how AdWords ads layout within the almost defunct browser size test by Google:
I expect a lot of interesting and fun comments on this post.
Forum discussion at Google.
Update: It seems Matt didn't mean any example of a ad to organic ratio search results page. Check out this tweet:
@rustybrick What I said ("even if we didn't block our results, the algo wouldn't fire") is true, b/c most Goog searches have no or few ads.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 14, 2013
So, not the really heavy ad pages, but the standard ad pages. Got that?
Comments:
J_Boch
06/13/2013 02:52 pm
Is this a joke? Have they tried to google something like "Cheap cruises"? I have to turn off toolbars if I want to see all of the first listing, and according to their own browser tool 10% of people don't see anything besides ads on Google without scrolling for this search. If that doesn't trigger Top Heavy, what would? Wallpapering the screen in ads?
Courtney Cox
06/13/2013 03:49 pm
Only half of people see more than 1 organic listing vs. 6 ads. What a joke.
RyanMJones
06/13/2013 04:03 pm
also, 20% only see paid ads. Yikes!
RyanMJones
06/13/2013 04:04 pm
For this, I'm only counting the % that sees at least 50% of the listing - as that's the IAB standard for "visible"
andyyo
06/13/2013 04:52 pm
Google: do as I say, not as I do.
Fede Einhorn
06/13/2013 08:14 pm
Certainly Google a joke. But I keep asking why oh why I go to Google to search and not bing, or duckduck by default!?!? Is it that we are all used to it? When we became so dumb that we can't switch to another service?!?
Chase Anderson
06/13/2013 09:09 pm
I'll begin placing 6-7 text ads above the fold on my sites right away!
Alan
06/14/2013 03:53 am
Clearly Matt has no idea. He doesn't write the code. A large portion of the advice he has given out lately can be ignored. if you want to see a good example look at Dr pete's tweet. https://twitter.com/dr_pete/status/345279702476414977
Scroogle
06/14/2013 05:13 am
Only Barry, Danny Sullivan and other loser liars trust their buddy Matt Cutts. They even have inside jokes with stuffed animals. Your site is getting slammed anyway, if you don;t listen to Scam Cutts at least you have a chance to make money, Google is rigged to increase ad clicks, Barry and Danny are essentially paid shills.
ethalon
06/14/2013 12:17 pm
That update was informative; and important. It will be ignored by the headless chicken crowd, but thanks for posting it.
mathewmakio
08/18/2013 08:07 pm
Does this update roll out constantly now? I was hit by something on the 15th of August 2013 the other day. Could it be pushing content down?
mathewmakio
08/18/2013 08:08 pm
got no bloody idea what I have been penalized for
Spook SEO
01/25/2014 04:15 pm
BARRY SCHWARTZ you write up good information and the conclusion is Standard Ads but how many numbers of ads that counting on Standard ads. A nice snapshot of the webpage that you have shared BARRY and interesting point is almost a full page covering by Google own Ads. Thanks for sharing