"Top Heavy" is just another word for the Page Layout Algorithm that was first launched in January 2012 prevententing sites that were “top heavy†with advertising from ranking in search. Search Engine Land came up with the phrase top heavy. http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-top-heavy-update. Around the 9th October Google announced a refresh of its Page Layout Algorithm (Top Heavy).
Panda is an algorithm filter aimed at fighting low quality content. Thus we get Top Heavy (Ads Above the Fold, Page Layout Algorithm) Penguin on the other hand is one aimed at fighting web spam (black hat SEO) These are two totally different algorithms
It is another buzzword that nobody knows how it works and still are talking about it on forums and blogs. Top heavy or page layout, what are the guidelines? Vague I'm sure.
You should know by now that Google are always vague. Especially with there algorithms. They tend to use the excuse "we don't want webmasters coming to close to our crawling methods". For what its worth, here's Googles article on the Page Layout Algorithm (a little vague it is) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html
Thank you but it's been a long time I stopped reading their crap, they can do what they want and I do what I want, that's better for me like this! If they want to penalize sites with ads above the fold, they can do it, it's their site, their rules, I couldn't care less.. The only problem is so many people are then creating thousands of threads everytime google farts, it's even worse than when apple farts
So true. And then on top of it all they give the algorithms nicknames (Top Heavy), confusing webmasters even more than they already are, thinking Matt Cutts has once again created another cyber pet and unleashed it to viciously and ferociously attack their websites.