Google above the fold update

[jay.raman]

Hi everyone,

Ever since the Jan 19th Google 'above the fold update' I have noticed some strange ranking changes in some of my sites.

1. rankings increased dramatically (not in top 50 to page 2) on Jan 19th for about 5 days then dropped out completely from the top 50.

2. our rankings then did the same thing again around Feb 2nd for about 5 -6 days then has bottomed out ever since.

We do not have any ads on the site but our pages are dominated by images for most of the 'above the fold' section then followed by the content down the page.

Any insight into this would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Andrew

[EGOL]

For some webmasters, Google has been mysterious for the past year.

Duplicate content, thin content, spun content, lots of ads above-the-fold, ugly design and other site characteristics are blamed for reduced rankings.

I have a site that contains some republished government content and some very short blog posts.  Some pages on that site saw reduced rankings in October.  We noindexed the duplicate and thin content in November plus cut back on some ads and most rankings recovered in January.

Lots of very experienced SEOs are guessing at what factors Google is using.

Anybody who tells you what to do based upon the minimal information that you provided is guessing.

Anything that you can do to strengthen your content to a unique and substantive position would probably be time well spent - even if it is not your current problem.   You say that you don't have ads, so you can eliminate that as a potential problem.