My website was effected by the update in November, it went from about 3000 hits a day to about 1300 hits a day.

But I don’t think that my ads are in the top, agreed one of them are in the top part of the website.
But after reading this post, I just might move the ad down under the converter.
Or should I just leave it.?

Yes again our traffic has dropped to almost nothing in fact if not for our steady repeat customers that we have had for years we would be out of business. Our site is selling packaging supplies for 40-60% less than the other 150,000,00 packaging distributors on the web but Google does not see that as important in this economy.

Every customer we have loves our low pricing so I wonder why is Google trying to put us out of business. They may not be aiming directly at us but our traffic has dropped about 85%

All we can do is sit on our hands and wonder why they are the self proclaimed web police. They created ADWORDS and now to control them we are toast. We have no ADWORDS and every customer that finds our site just raves about how they wish they had found us years ago but Google has another idea. Also the Google +1 button I placed has no clicks at all. Thousands of orders each month but our customers have no time to click buttons they just want to order and get back to their customers and jobs.

Some of us use the web for business and to save money. What an out of date concept.

http://www.gbepackaging.com
We can save you money even if Google thinks you should be reading lots of content. We all have 20 jobs to do today exept at Google.

I’m losing about 30% of Google search traffic to a calculator website since the Page Layout update. Based on a week’s worth of data and historical trends, I am convinced the site was penalized. I assume it was for ads unless I am missing something else. During a season when visits should be up by more than 10%, traffic from Google dropped by more than 20% starting Thursday January 20th.

I tend to think the calculators are similar in value to an artist or video site where greater than 90% of the page value is in a small space and you don’t really need multiple pages of text to get your point across.

The layout of pages in question is intended to keep 95% of the value of each page — the calculator forms — accessible, with minimum scrolling. Using Google Browser Size I’d say it does this for greater than 90% or 95% of users depending on the page. The main value is easy to find. For an example see this calculator page. In my opinion, any textual content on calculator pages only holds 5% to 10% of the page value; people come for the calculators. Users might read content at first but they keep coming back for the calculators.

Obviously I disagree with how the updates have assessed my websites although, I can agree with the core logic. Therefore, I’ll be reworking page layouts over the coming weeks. Of course I can rearrange ad space and top-fill with more content. My real hope is that regaining traffic doesn’t require excessive text above the fold, and/or the calculators, obscuring the real value.

3 of my clients sites were positively impacted by this latest change, however its a shame most of Googles first “search results” are adverts.

It`s kind of hard to think that YouTube would be on the list because Google owns it and it`s a very popular site that people just punch up directly instead of searching for a certain video first – (they go to you tube and then look for videos) at least that`s what I thought.
Anyhow my website was impacted (I believe it was for having adds above the fold)and I finally found the probable problem and fixed it. It`s been a couple of days now and my search position has returned now.

Nice post and have a great day.

99% of my clients don’t use ads so nothing to worry about there, but I’ll have to go through some of them and revise their content above the fold.

Trust me, One day Google comes up with a Panda update like “Punish all sites with links in the Comment section”

LOL, imagine where will you be then?

Google is messing up with its core business these days, soon they realize it.

P.S I was not effected by any one of the panda update though, i just wanna say “ITS NOT A GOOD SIGN”

Internet is just becoming “No Freedom, and its not funny anymore, not anymore”

“We would never penalize competitors, we always play fair and ethically.”

Matt, who are you trying to chide here? Google has gone after competitors tooth and nail and we all know it. Google’s “Do no Evil” mantra is and always has been a farce.

The Panda updates and these types of algorithm changes have done nothing to make search better…in fact it’s quite worse. Google continually penalizes small sites and people who do good work and reward the spammers and scammers.

Is Google going to penalize their own site for the ad layout changes? I didn’t think so.

Google search continues to decline and eventually I hope it becomes the companies death knell. Google doesn’t care about users or web publishers…it only cares about the bottom line.

By the way Matt…Google has gotten rich off the backs of small content publishers who you continually ignore and lets be honest here…reputable companies have a dialogue with it’s customers and users and yet the largest entity on the internet “Google” goes out of it’s way to make sure they can’t be contacted.