Content Below the Fold

[Ria_]

I feel prioritising elements to be "above the fold" is a bit of an outdated concept these days.

Where is the fold? Different devices and screen resolutions will have different folds, and more websites are being designed now to make the traditional "above the fold" section more visually interesting and designed for user experience, rather than packed full of content.

The higher the content is in the source code itself, the more weight it will have on the page. This doesn't necessarily translate to the "visually higher the content is on the page". Google is going to be reading from top to bottom of your code, so naturally you want the most important content/links to be found first. As long as you meet (or exceed!) the user's expectation of the content upon arrival, and you keep the code tidy in terms of how much Google has to read before it gets to the real valuable content, I doubt Google's going to worry about whether users have to scroll a little to get to it.

[BeckyKey]

Great thank you, you read so many conflicting articles that it's difficult to know.

I'll see if we can look at our code, but I'd want to be mindful of not manipulating Google.

Thank you!

[Ria_]

There's no manipulation whatsoever. In fact, Google encourage website developers and SEOs to optimise/tidy their code and keep a good code-to-content ratio. This is why Google gives us so many tools in order to do so. It makes our sites easier to crawl for Google, and in return Google may even like us more for it!

Just found an article that sums it up quite nicely:

"Essentially what is being stated is a fairly logical conclusion: reduce the amount of code on your page and the content (you know, the place where your keywords are) takes a higher priority. Additionally compliance will, by necessity, make your site easy to crawl and, additionally, allow you greater control over which portions of your content are given more weight by the search engines. The thinking behind validating code for SEO benefits is that, once you have a compliant site, not only will your site be a better user experience on a much larger number of browsers, but you’ll have a site with far less code, that will rank higher on the search engines because of it."

- http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/

But going back to your original post, "above-the-fold is dead", yadda yadda... So long as your content in the source is metaphorically "above the fold" and not drowning in heavy code, on the page itself just worry about giving your users the "experience" that they're looking for. And not how many pixels from the top of the browser your content is. Hope that makes more sense!

[Vijay-Gaur]

Additionally, do check the content using Fetch as google in Google Search Console / Webmaster tools. It would really help you see how spiders see the content compared to users. This is an important aspect of SEO which a lot of people ignore, you are looking to find that whether the spiders see a structured view of the content and not messy. I hope this helps, if you have further questions, please feel free to ask. Regards, Vijay

[ThompsonPaul]

While theoretically logical, Google's own John Mueller stated last week that code to text ratio has absolutely no effect on crawling of a site, and in a followup question, he directly told me text/code ratio has no effect as a ranking factor either.

These used to be very minor considerations back when the search engine crawlers weren't as powerful, but no longer.

Fully agree with Pia that the idea of "above the fold" influencing ranking is nonsense as well. Given that the sweet spot for consistently high-ranking pages is ~2200 words, the idea that only the first paragraph or two are more important is unsupportable.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[BlueCorona]

Any content below the fold will still be read. Are you trying to hide it but still get the SEO value? If that's the case, I would create a collapsible tab to keep the content on the page but hidden. If you want it to be visible, leave it as is and don't worry about Google not reading it—it will be read.

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thank you for the replies. I don't want to hide it, I just can't have it pushing products down the page so they can't be seen..

I thought in Google webmaster guidelines they included a comment to say they will ignore content behind tabs?

Becky

[BeckyKey]

Hi

So I did fetch as Google  - and I'm seeing the page quite differently if I'm Googlebot vs. visitors.

It just sees a few big images, I can't see it rendering any product listings or content - do I now have a bigger problem?

Thank you

[ThompsonPaul]

Yup - Google still says content that can only be seen after a user interaction is given less importance. Kinda stupid, given that things like tabs/accordians are a major usability enhancement, but that's still where we are.

P.

[ThompsonPaul]

I'm not seeing a problem in my GoogleBot simulators, Becky, but the one within your Google Search Console is still the best judge. Have you tried reloading the Fetch as... a couple of times? And tried it on different pages?

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Yes I tried different pages and it's still the same. I think it's to do with things we have blocked in robots.txt...

[BeckyKey]

Yeh it's disappointing.

I've tried having some content behind a tab and some under the products and I am not seeing either one as having much of an effect.

Unless I remove it altogether, I'm not sure what else I can do with it?

[BlueCorona]

Hi Becky,

Here is what I found:

The pros and cons of hiding content using JavaScript and CSS (display: none) has been a topic of some debate within the SEO industry, and Google’s comments over time have somewhat added to the confusion.

• **November 2014 **– Google’s John Mueller stated that Google _“may not” _index or rank hidden content. In aGoogle+ Hangout the following month, John repeated this, stating that hidden content would be _“discounted”_and has been for a number of years
• **21 July 2015 **– Google’s Gary Illyes, contributing to a Stack Overflow forum thread , provided clarification of this by stating that this type of content is given “way less weight in ranking”
• **27 July 2015 **– In a separate Stack Overflow thread on the same topic, Gary Illyes again confirmed that _“[Google] will index that but the content’s weight will be lower since it’s hidden” _

So the content will still be indexed, but deemed less important by the crawlers.