A critical Google algorithm change for publishers has been recently announced by Google. The update will penalize sites that display above the fold ads to an excessive degree, or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. The decision was based on “numerous” user complaints regarding sites that clutter content with ads.
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. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.
According to Google, the algorithm change will affect less than 1% sites globally, meaning that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. The good news for publishers who have too many ads above the fold, is that Google does re-crawl sites that decide to comply with the new rules and update their pages to display content first. But:
If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.
This will be a good changes for Google algorithm. I believe that putting useful information to the users is much better that putting lots of ads into website pages.