Google latest algorithm change is related to site layout and where content lives on a webpage. This is mostly effecting sites that place a lot of ads at the top of the page before content is available to read. However, if a user has to scroll down in order to see any content at all on the site, Google has started penalizing this as well.
While most of our clients don’t run adsense or ads at the tops of the pages, some graphic heavy sites or sites with flash banners or large banners at the top may be adversely effected by these changes. Also pages that have very little written content, but just video or images are sometimes being penalized in search rankings.
If adding video to your site, make sure to include some relevant content on the page as well – worst case you can just summarize the video on the page. Also, it may be useful to reduce the size of your graphical banner at the top if that is taking up too much vertical space.
Along with this change, and many others that Google is implementing, comes the potential for higher rankings for sites with fresh content. Each time the Googlebot crawls your page it is looking for any new, relevant content. As new quality content increases on your site, your site becomes more of an authority in Google’s eyes, which improves search ranking.
In a recent blogpost (linked below), Google’s Matt Cutts mentions that the search engine giant is anticipating making over 500 changes to the search algorithm this year alone. Many of these will be related to rewarding sites that have relevant, useful and fresh content, and devaluing those that are static sites without useful content. If possible, make it a priority to add some content to your site this month. Posting a simple blog post or article on a regular basis signals to google that your site is active and relevant, and deserves a higher rank.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
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