Is "Above the Fold Content" still a thing?

[MEllsworth]

Many of our pages have the textual content stuffed at the bottom of the page because the manager doesn't think anybody reads it and it is an eyesore to have at the top: http://www.stevinsontoyotawest.com/schedule-service

For some light reading here is Google’s official blog talking about content quality:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html This references Ads vs Content showing above the fold. However, in our case it has to do with images vs ads and stuffing text at the bottom of pages.

Here is a bit of heavier reading. You can do a quick search for "Fold" to see their interpretation. 
http://macedynamics.com/research/content-quality-score/

I understand that images are still content, however hardly any of the images have Alt text and they are not even named with keywords so Google really can't distinguish what the page is about through images alone. I'm not about to go through the entire site and add Alt text and rename images because I have much more to do on my plate.

So, the questions is: Is stuffing content at the bottom of the page, below all images/inventory/widgets ok to do or should we stick with the eyesore content at the top of the page? Thoughts?

[aarongray]

always work off this. If you're putting content there because it's to help google than yes it's going to hurt you but if it's part of the website the design it's fine.

The sites i have seen be hit are ones where people have put content below the footer itself or it looks like spam.

[MEllsworth]

Hey Aaron,

I agree that if I add spammy content to any page that it will hurt rankings because I'm adding content to just add content. However, I don't agree that simply by forcing the content to the top (as Google suggests we do in the official Google Blog mentioned above) that it will hurt rankings. Like I said, the only issue is that my manager thinks it is an eyesore. I do think that if it is well worded and good content that people will end up reading it and learning more about what the page is about. The only thing I want to know is if the official Google blog post is still relevant as it was written in 2012. Structure, Design and UX have changed a lot since then. How big of a factor is Content Above the Fold vs Below in 2015?

[aarongray]

I don't think you need to worry about it. I think what this blog was talking about is more people who do spam content way down the page under the footer kind of thing.

I think if you build a good website which has content below the fold I wouldn't be worried at all. I have clients who rank for some very hard keywords and for conversion we have less above the fold so it's pushing them to do one of our call to actions.

Always remember google wants you to build a website which users like not a website that google likes.