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GooPLA - the Google Page Layout Algorithm

Once more Google announced a new change in how they deal with search quality. And again, managed to shoot themselves in the foot.

this time around it was about the (dubbed by me) GooPLA which will apparently affect only 1% of queries and is designed to incur a dampening factor on sites that have an egregious level of real estate above the fold taken up with advertising. Of course many folks were quick to point out a lot of Googe's own SERPs fly in the face of that.

To that, Google responded by saying it is about the level of such activity (percentage of pages?). And that only a small percentage of search results look that way. Uh huh. Anyway, here's s abunch of coverage for ya;.

• Page layout algorithm improvement - Google
• Google page layout algorithm; page segmentation gets a new twist - SNC
• Google’s New Page Layout Update Targets Sites With Too Many Ads - SEW
• Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm - SEL
• Will Google penalise itself for excessive ads above the fold? - Blogstorm

As I mentioned in my own post on it all, what was mostly interesting for me was the fact that we have more insight into the use ot page segmentation methods and even a new name for the lexicon (again, I have taken to calling the algo, not the update; GooPLA).

Due to it only being some 1%, (for now) most of you won't have to be overly concerned about it. What about large on-site graphics? From what we can tell and what we know, it isn't affecting sites such as ecommerce where big ass graphics are the standard operating procedure for home pages.

This is, so far, only about ads (sales txt, txt in image, outbound link, aff link etc..)

We'll see where it leads.

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