Does Google look at page design
-
Hi everybody,
At the moment i'm creating several webshops and websites with the same layout, so visitors can recognize the websites are from the same company. But i was wondering: Does google look at the layout of a webpage that it's not a copy of another website?
This because loads of website have the same wordpress/joomla templates etc, or doesn't this effect rankingpositions?
Thank you,
-
Hi Cyrus,
Maybe I wasn't very clear in my previous comment; I know using website templates on multiple domains won't cause you to get a penalised by Google, but the article that was linked to said, Google has changed the algorithm to look at the layout of a web page and this didn't make sense to me.
This is why I mentioned changing your on-page optimisation to ensure you at least have different content on different domains that use the same template.
Slightly off topic, but I wanted to say that I thought your White Board Friday was really good (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/stop-optimizing-and-start-creating-whiteboard-friday), you covered a good topic and explained it really well.
-
Hi Ben,
There's no evidence that I'm aware of that Google penalizes sites for using duplicate templates. It would be the same thing as using the same template on 1000 pages of your blog - you aren't penalized as long as the majority of the 1000 pages have unique content. It works the same way across multiple domains.
-
Google can determine the screen resolution your website supports and can then calculate the contents above the fold through some predefined criteria. So it has nothing to do with the screen resolution of the end user. To better understand how Google do this, check the browser size tool in Google labs. The concept of above the fold used by Google is to actually filter out those web pages on which ads outweigh the contents as it leads to poor user expedience..
-
I am not sure that whether Google checks for the design of the website for its ranking or not and if it checks then how does it count ? But one thing i can say that it counts the user experience. If you think that your design is providing a good user experience it is OK but at the same time if you have same template as other website have and a user visits both the website he would be confused and it is not a good user experience. So decision is up to you what you wants to give your user confusion or clear Precision.
-
I'd also like to add that the webmasters blog may give some true facts about what Google's uses to rank sites in its algorithm, but if you stop and think, Google have always tried to be very protective about telling us what causes a site to rank well in the SERPs. They may be reporting false information on the blog to keep us all on our toes, but that's my cynical side talking.
-
I fear we may be deviating from the question a little here, as the main crux of the debate was whether Google, and that quote was in a comment from a user, not as part of the article, so its questionable whether that's exactly what was said and whether it was said by Matt Cutts at all.
In terms of Google looking at site layout as part of their algorithm that article linked to above contains the following, "In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result."
Its a good article, but it does make me question how Google can possibly use site layout in its algorithm for the SERP results. There are template sites out there that may have a wealth of unique and highly valuable content in page and above the fold, so would Google be marking those pages down because some other sites use the same template?
I go back to my original point about ensuring the on-page SEO and layout of the page content is unique and different from other sites that share the same look and feel just to ensure that its semantically different. Maybe change the order of elements (paragraphs, images, lists etc) and maybe add in additional content to avoid any possible penalties.
-
Guys. Here is some definitive stuff from Matt Cutts from Google (if you can say he really ever gives us anything definitive) about "above the fold"
"…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."
If you want to read the entire post, here is the link......
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
-
Hi Himanshu,
Can you explain your answer a little more please, as I don't understand how or why Google would be able to check content "above the fold" because visitors have a variety of monitor resolutions so the fold will be in a different location every time.
It was my understanding that the concept of "above the fold" has been redundant for some time as people intuitively scroll down the page. If anything you should be penalised for stuffing all your relevant content at the top of your pages, because it would be borderline spammy and the Panda update was bought in to reduce spammy sites.
In terms of the design I agree (partially) with Himanshu. Google won't penalise you for using the same template but the content must be significantly different across your sites that use the same template to avoid cross domain duplication of content.
-
Google wont penalize you for duplicate web design. But it does look at the layout of a web page to check how much content is above the fold using page layout algorithm. So while designing a layout make sure that you have considerable amount of contents above the fold. Web design doesn't effect ranking position directly but indirectly it can effect because of high bounce rate and other user metrics.
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
-
How many pages should we optimise?
I have more than 250 pages on my site including my products. Is it a good idea to optimise each page with a unique keyword or is there a limit to the number of pages we should aim for?
On-Page Optimization | | Timberwink0 -
Google Rich Snippet
So i have been implementing rich snippets for work and all has been good until now, As you can see below the meta description has all of a sudden included the review date. The review date is the only date on the page. Any ideas what could be causing this? Thanks wqLKKl9
On-Page Optimization | | David-McGawn0 -
Page rank check
Hello everyone, How long should I wait to see if page rank for optimized pages have improved? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Help with the indexation of my page
Hi all, I have a problem with my website. When writing site:www.pinesapiensa.com there're no pages indexed although the webmaster tools tells me that the sitemap file has been processed in 13 May and the number of indexed paged are 21. ¿What could be happening? I have to mention that there are two domains "www.piensapiensa.es" and "www.piensapiensa.com" addressing the same website and there's a redirection from piensapiensa.com to piensapiensa.com but it doesn't work properly. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Which redirect to use when redirecting to https page from http page
I have one form under https which is redirected from the regular http page. this site was not made by me and I am trying to understand if the way it was redirected using 302 redirect is a problem Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Main page deindexed by google.
3 days ago our main page('/') has stopped appear in google results. Rest of pages works fine. Even our main page from canadian version of site with similar content works fine. Some times canadian page appears for key word where we had our com version before. But I think this is just result of disappearing com version. Any suggestion were to look? Messages box in google webmastertools is empty. Could this be the question too long page title? PS: Does any way exist to check if we were punished by Google and reason of this? For Bing and Yahoo everything works fine. PPS: We have just found that "cache:our_site.com" and "info:our_site.com" returns in google our_site.ca. So this should be reason of problem. So now we are looking how to fix this.
On-Page Optimization | | ctam0 -
Should I Remove This Subdirectory From Google?
On my site, I have a subdirectory. It posts articles from a bunch of websites that my readers are interested in & links back to all of those sites. There is no original content in it. There are over 1700 indexed pages in this subdirectory. The rest of my site has about 500 (all original content). The search engine traffic for this subdirectory only accounts for 3.9% of my sites overall visits. Should I consider removing this subdirectory? Could all the duplicate content be hurting the rankings of my legit pages? What do you all think?
On-Page Optimization | | PedroAndJobu0 -
Google Penalty?
What are the characteristics of a Google penalty - i.e. how do you know by looking at the rankings for your keywords? Do all keywords that you had previously ranked for fall from say top 5 to nowhere? Do you disappear from SERP for a branded keyword? Or something else?? Basically how do you know if you have been penalized? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0