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
-
Website speed is above ?
I want to ask that my best tennis guru website speed is above 2.8 sec do it have any negative impact on my site?
Web Design | | looper50 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Website spread over two domains - The Good,The Bad and the Ugly ?
Hi, I am wondering if the way I have set up our website site is creating more harm than good ? All our SEO efforts and content is located @ www.sparrowmakeup.com.au however our portfolio is located at www.make-up-artists.com.au. Questions ? Will Analytic bounce rates effect my SERP, as most people click on the portfolio link in the first 5-15 sec of landing on our page ?? Is there a better way of setting it up ? the reason I set it up like this in the first place was because we wanted a different look/theme for the portfolio. (using WP) Is there any other issues that this setup might have in the SEO / SERP department ?? Is there any benefits and how can I maximize on them (silver lining) Your help and experience is greatly appreciated. Regards Ed
Web Design | | EdsonGroupMedia0 -
How do I gain full SEO value from individual property pages?
A client of ours has a vacation rental business with rental locations all over the country. Their old sites were a messy assembly of black hat, broken links and htaccess files that were used over and over on each site. We are redoing everything for them, in one site, with multiple subdirectories for individual locations, like Aspen, Fort Meyers, etc. Anyhow, I'm putting together the SEO plan for the site and I have a problem. The individual rental properties have great SEO value (lots of text, indexable pictures, can create google/bing location pages), and are great for linking in social media (Look at this wonderful property, rental price just reduced!). However, I don't want individual properties, which will have very similar keywords, links, descriptions, etc, competing with each other when indexed. Truth be told, I don't really want search engines linking directly to the individual property pages at all. The intended browsing experience should allow a user to "narrow down" exactly what they're seeking using the site until the perfect rental appears. What I want is for searchers to be directed to the property listing index that most closely matches what they're seeking (Ft. Meyers Rental Condos or Breckenridge Rental Homes), and then allow them to narrow it down from there. This is ideal for the users, because it allows them to see all available properties that match what they want, and ideal for the customer, because it applies dozens of pages of SEO mojo to a single index, rather than dozens of pages. So I can't "noindex" or "nofollow", because I want all that good SEO mojo. I can't REL=CANONICAL, because the property pages aren't similar enough to the index. I can't 301 Redirect because I want the users to be able to see the property pages at some point. I'm stymied.
Web Design | | SpokeHQ0 -
Website Redesign 301 Question
Hey Moz gang, I have a question that I believe I know how I'm going to handle, but just wanted some feedback from the Moz community on best practices. At my company, we're going through a site redesign. At the moment, our site is deeper than it should be with many one-off feature pages. For example, we have a Features page that then links to individual pages for each specific feature. One goal we have set for the redesign is a condensing of the pages in order to make the site more user-friendly, easy to manage and content rich. My question is this. We have a lot of these individual pages that I want to essentially kill and merge into one page. It is okay (best practice) to 301 all of those individual feature specific pages to the single Features page since that is now where all of that content lives?? I want to retain the link juice that those pages have gained over time, but I don't want to get penalized for too many 301's to a single page. Any advice or previous experience would be awesome 🙂 Thanks, Lance
Web Design | | RobinBryant10 -
Google penalty for links opening in new tab?
Our web services provided suggested that Google doesn't like in-text links that open the link in a new tab. Can anyone verify this? We often link to outside credible resources for our audience, though it seems smarter to open in a new tab rather than risk that the person will not navigate back to our site after finding us. Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | jhamlin0 -
Can i do this? Will Google penalize me?
I have a page for a Criminal Defense Attorney and i set up a list of the type of criminal charges he is certified to deal with. I wanted to use title tags and put the Keyword "Miami Criminal Defense Attorney" & "Miami Traffic Defense Lawyer"... My question is will Google penalize me for plugging the same Key words over and over on the title tag for each ?? CHECK THE IMAGE to see what I'm talking about... thanks guys. x97dl
Web Design | | marig0