Can ads placement above the fold impact search engine rankings and do Google announce several algo updates in less than two weeks? It seems to be the case and already in January this year Google Webmaster Blog told they might go after pages having ads in places leading to a poor user experience.

“Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change”.

Apparently, it took quite a few months to get the new algorithm change involving page layout. Webmasters trying to put Google Adsense ads above the fold are not only giving users a bad user experience, they will also discover some undesirable impact on search engine optimisation, unless the ad placement changes very quickly and goes below the fold instead. The only users annoyed about this change are probably the Adsense publishers being penalised.

SEO Specialist finds this to be an excellent update, giving better user experience. What do you think?