Google Penalizing Websites that Have Contact Forms at Top of Website Page?
-
Has anyone else heard of Google penalizing websites for having their contact forms located at the top of the website?
For example http://www.austintenantadvisors.com/
Look forward to hearing other thoughts on this.
-
@ John - Sounds like a useful experiment for someone who can code and wants YouMoz exposure.
@ G.L.A. - G's "business model" is to use search to sell ads and not to provide the "best" results. I would not be surprised at all if G is now penalizing large contact forms, contact forms above the fold, etc. at least as harshly as some of the earlier Panda updates penalized over use of AdWords. If Adwords ads are not immune under certain conditions, why would contact forms for the site itself be treated more generously assuming all other things are equal ?
-
You could try an A/B test. On some pages, place the form below your #container div and absolute position the contact form back up to the top with CSS. After that, monitor for a bit and see if it helps. Perhaps it's the making of a future YOUmoz blog post?
-
I don't think the theory matches what google is trying to accomplish with many businesses the best thing customer can do for themselves is fill out a form & get what they need I think its almost like saying google would penalize you for putting your phone number up top.....
-
Nathan - Someone recently posted a thread on BHW which suggests Penguin penalized sites similar to what you're describing. (The examples are worth looking at and comparing to your site.) Other people are insisting that Penguin does not apply to any on page variables. Without setting up some throw away sites and testing, I do not know the answer and wish I did.
-
Google introduced a new algorithm change a few months back that looks at your page layout and if the ads above the fold are excessive, your site can be penalized and downgraded in the search results.
I have never heard of anything that would indicate this also applies to contact forms.
I would have said that normally it would always be best to put the content higher - and you would not want to push that content down (for similar reasons to the banner ads pushing content down). You want a good user experience. however - your form is integrated in a very thin bar and does not compromise the user experience in my opinion.
I would say you have nothing to worry about with that form and its placement.
I have put the relevant part of the GOOGLE release though below as it pertains to page layout and placement of content.
Quote:
We've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the 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. 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.
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
-
A question about title tag when the page has 2 services.
Hi all, Assuming a company has two services: SEO and PPC. Here is the situation: I would like to focus on SEO for now but also don't want to leave my PPC service out of the page. SEO accounts for 60% of the content, while PPC accounts for 40%. Assuming the content (SEO + PPC) of the page will not change, which title tag would you prefer, and why? SEO | brand name (Is it appropriate that the title focus on SEO but the content of the page contains PPC) SEO | PPC | brand name (Will the keywords dilute each other?) SEO | SEM Agency | brand name (The idea behind it is that SEM includes SEO and PPC so I think Google would be OK with the page ranking for SEO and also including PPC in the content. I really appreciate your help and explanation. Thank you!
Web Design | | Raymondlee0 -
Stolen website code - is this common?
I checked my google analytics stats under network - hostname and found another website showing up for some of the traffic. When i looked at that site's code it started with
Web Design | | AISFM0 -
Main page redirect affecting search results?
Question.... A recent change was made to our page www.BGU.edu by a marketing person. So now when you type in www.BGU.edu it actually redirects to a different page www.BGU.edu/inquiry This is a really bad idea isn't it? I do not know enough about SEO to know a lot, and just joined SEOmoz but do I need to tell the admin to change it back?
Web Design | | nongard10 -
Redesigning a really old Website with old-fashioned permalinks
Hey SEO-Pros, I'm currently redesigning a quite old website, with the following URL structure: TLD/category/category.php?interview_id=819 The new Version will be a little more SEO-friendly: TLD/interviews/name-of-interview/ I know I have to do a 301-Redirect for all the old URLs to the new ones in order to keep the (until now pretty good) Google Ranking. If the rankings drop after the redesign has been done, I'll surely get killed 😉 So, Is there any easy way of creating these 301-Redirects (must be thousands of URLs...)? Best Regards guys and thanks for your help!
Web Design | | dominator0 -
3 Brands, 3 Services, 3 Different Websites Right?
My client was told that having 1 website for 3 different brands/services is better than having 3 websites. I need your help to prove my value to a new client. This client has worked with Reach Local on PPC for some time and when they first got started the Reach Local Markering Consultant told this cleint that they needed to have one site for better SEO purposes. The client was told that Google ranks websites higher if they have more paid traffic going to them. I've been doing this for long enough to realize this does not help ranking, at least not enough to make a difference. Keep in mind this is for 3 different companies. One company does plumbing, another electrical and the last one does air conditioning. They also have 4 locations but only two locations have mutliple services opperating out of them. I understand these 2 location will not have there own Google+ Local / Places listing. Using the same address for 2 different business and expecting a first page ranking is just not possible. Right now when you visit the clients website you see a logo that rotates with a banner section that follows the logo rotation. First you see the AC Company and then the Plumbing etc. I see this as confusing to the end user and it is more work to get it ranked for SEO. I recommended that we build 3 speerate websites for each service and just list out all the addresses that the company services on the contact page. I would also design inside the footer links to the other services for branding purposes. Please share your thoughts on how you would handle this if you were doing the SEO for your own 3 different business services. I really appreicate any input/insight to this. Thank you so much in advance!!!!
Web Design | | 1SMG0 -
How much content is too much? Best Pages For Content?
To my understanding content has a lot to do with organic rankings if written correctly. My question is, how much content is too much and what pages are best to place content. Our company sells very costly products. Our customers call to purchase, we do not have an eCommerce site. Write now we have on average 350 words per page. We have about 200+ pages. Each page is written for that general category and each product has its own unique content. It seems to me that the pages with less content, tend to rank a bit better. As we are in the process of redoing our website, is there any recommendations on writing content, or adjusting the amount of text. I am thinking a lot of our text is informative only to a certain extent. Would writing content just for the main category page be better, and then on the actual product page, have only about 250 words as a description? Are there any other recommendations for SEO that are fairly new? Besides the Title, Description, Heading Tags, Image Alts, URLS etc.
Web Design | | hfranz0 -
Why is site not being indexed by Google, and not showing on a crawl test??
On a site we developed of which .com is forwarded to .net domain, we quit getting crawled by google on about the 20th of Feb. Now when we try to run a crawl test on either url, we get There was an error fetching this page. Error description For some reason the page returned did not describe itself as an html page. It could be possible that the url is serving an image, rss feed, pdf, or xml file of some sort. The crawl tool does not currently report metrics on this type of data. Our other sites are fine and this was up to this date. We took out noodp, noydir today as the only thing we could think of. Site is on WP cms.
Web Design | | RobertFisher0 -
Using Wordpress as CMS for large Websites
Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!
Web Design | | RishadShaikh590