Does Google look at page design

[iwebdevnl]

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,

[OptimizeSmart]

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.

[blacey]

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.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

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

[blacey]

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.

[blacey]

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.

[konstantinfo]

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.

[OptimizeSmart]

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..

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[blacey]

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.