Comment by jonheller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonheller | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the backlash against "the fold" has been taken a bit too far. Yes, we know that people scroll. But it's still essential to have the important parts of your site visible in the three seconds a user takes to make a decision on whether to stay on your site or not.

Plus, Matt Cutts recently said at Pubcon that Google now analyzes the content which it decides is above the fold, and places a higher value on that content in terms of determining SEO results.

I completely agree that we shouldn't stuff the top of the page with every important pieces of content and navigation option to the point where it makes the page a mess. But at the same time you can't treat a really long page as if the content in the middle or bottom gets the same attention as the content at the top.

If this is true about the Google fold that has got to be one of the most stupid things I've heard them do.

So Google decides where the fold is and not the designer or visitor? That seems stupid to me. How are they to determine such a thing? How are we as website creators supposed to know what Google's idea of the fold is to make sure we get that high value? Seems another way for people to game Google by stuffing all the content within this "fold" making for crappy websites.

Am I crazy that I think we shouldn't be designing websites for search engines but for people?

This is probably just an iteration on earlier methods of prioritizing a page's content.

Previously, Google would place a higher priority on content that came towards the beginning of a page. As users became aware of this, they then began organizing their code so that the most SEOable content was at the beginning of the HTML file, but used CSS to make sure that the what users saw as the beginning of the page was still optimized for people.

Presumably, now Google is checking to see which parts are actually styled to appear at the beginning, regardless of order in the source files.

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