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
-
JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?
I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
Web Design | | sb1030
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.0 -
Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?
Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version. I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards
Web Design | | SEOguy10 -
How we can check whether website design is good for SEO or not?
Is there any tool available to check website design whether it is good for SEO or not?
Web Design | | ross254sidney0 -
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 -
Adding breadcrumbs in the body of a page
We want to implement breadcrumbs to improve the usability of our website - if we manually input breadcrumbs into the body of every page via our CMS are there any negative effects?
Web Design | | braunna0 -
Solutions for too many links on page (Ecommerce)?
Hello Mozzers, Most Ecommerce websites I've come across have four main link sections - Main Nav - About, Contact etc Side Nav - List of Categories + Products Footer - Useful links etc Promotional Area - Promoting Best sellers / Latest products This ends up totalling anything from 200 to 500 links. I was wondering is there a reasonable solution to hide some of the links? Or should I just ignore the warning? Thanks, Dan
Web Design | | Sparkstone0 -
Seo for flash home page?
I have a client who insists their home page be a single graphic image of their logo with php menus linking to all of the other pages up top. This appears to me to be an seo nightmare. They seem to be unwilling to have anything to do with changing the appearance and want to rely on seo for "all the other pages" on the site. What's an SEO to do in this situation? Is it possible to have a flash image that lands on a "homepage" for google to crawl, rather than a single image? What's the best seo approach here?
Web Design | | peaceland0