Hi, I was recently experimenting with my site by adding more affiliate buttons on the single pages. When the content was no longer visible without scrolling down, my rankings dropped for a number of days. When I removed the extra affiliate ads to the original form where the content is visible without scrolling, by the next day the rankings where back to normal. Now my questions are, was this just a coincidence? Or is Google really ranking according to "usability" factors? Can someone else test this on a non-critical site. Thanks in advance
There is some evidence going around that Google is measuring the amount of content visible above the fold, without scrolling, compared to the amount of ads. The amount of content needs to be the same or greater then then amount of ads or the rankings for your page could be adversely affected. http://andrewhansen.name/affiliate-marketing/google-checkmates-me-but-reveals-internal-secrets/
I had this happen to me too pays to track how your site handles changes. I think Google lowers your quality score when you have too many ads. How many ads did you have
I agree there, I think google doesn't let you have more than one ad in the content. Then you can add one in the sidebar and one up in the header, not more than this.
i don't think that content visibility after scrolling has anything to do with ranking. Google follows the textual content from page source. So it doesn't matter what type of design you are having in front end. But what might have happened is a) the website loading time is a factor b) including relevant text and links within first 100 lines of your website