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Scoring a good listing in the search engines just got a lot harder

It's funny how some four-letter words are really taboo. I mean they're just words and although words have power four-letter words are really only a collection of innocuous letters and four-letter words only contain four of them. You'll see those letters in various combinations in hundreds of thousands of other words and there are no problems but combine them into certain four-letter words and suddenly they're taboo.

The Press doesn't like them, religious nutters don't like them, parents don't like them but adult webmasters love them and it's all because they usually have some sexual connotation. But there's one four-letter word that runs against the trend ... it even starts with that dreaded letter 'f' but has no sexual connotations at all.

The press has no trouble with it, the religious right have no problems with it and parents couldn't care less about it ... but adult webmasters are going to grow to hate it. It's the four-letter word 'fold' and again, it's just a collection of perfectly innocent letters and it's not even a power word ... yet. It doesn't make ordinary people want to do things, it doesn't cause a major reaction in anyone just yet but it won't be long before the word 'fold' makes webmasters groan and perhaps even shake their heads in despair.

How could such a simple word cause so much grief? How could folding something cause such anxiety and despair and why now and not at some time in the past?

Well firstly let me say that we're not talking about folding anything. This fold - the one that is going to cause so much angst is not a verb - this fold is a noun and it has been around for a very long time. Newspapers have always dealt with 'above the fold' and 'below the fold' and their terminology has crept over to the Web and it's going to bite us even harder than it has in the past.

When newspapers talk about something being 'above the fold' they're talking about where something appears on the page. Above the fold is the area above where a reader folds the paper horizontally to make it more manageable and newspapers have always known that above that fold was very valuable property. More readers read what appears above the fold than what appears below the fold.

Here in Internet Land many people read what appears at the top of the screen then don't bother to scroll down the page. That means that advertising, navigation links and important text that appear at the top of the page will be seen by everyone while those items that appear only when the surfer scrolls will be missed by many. Even search engine spiders pay more attention to what appears towards the top of the page than what appears towards the bottom of the page.

But we've known all that ... or we should have known all that ... for quite some time so why now has the word 'fold' taken on such an unpleasant meaning for webmasters?

Well it all has to do with Google and Universal Search and where the fold appears on search engine results pages. In the past you could reasonably expect a search engine results page to display around six links to sites that dealt with what you were searching for above the fold and another four below the fold.

Now that Universal Search is being introduced to the Google search results many websites that previously appeared above the fold are now disappearing below the fold. Many websites that previously appeared on the first page of the search engine results pages for various terms are now being pushed off page one and onto page two ... or even worse.

Many page one listings are now beginning to include search results for videos on Youtube or Google Video, Google Images, Google Maps and all their other previously under-utilized search engines. So now you can't be happy with just reaching page one of the search engine results pages for your chosen terms, you can't even be happy with reaching position four or five.

It's nothing less than position three or you stand a good chance of not appearing above the fold. And just getting a blue link up there in positions one to three may not do you much good either. Have a little play in Google and search for a few popular terms, have a look at the search engine results page and see what attracts your attention.

If there's a video in one of the top few spots then the chances are that you won't even notice the blue links because the image that comes with the video link will attract your attention ... just as it attracts the attention of everyone else who searches for that term.

Of course, over here in adult we're a bit more adept at turning things like that to our advantage so, hopefully, you'll still be able to draw lots of traffic from Google but there's no doubt that it's going to get harder ... much harder.

And just in case you really want to give yourself nightmares try those search terms in Ask.com. When you do that don't try to hide behind a smokescreen and tell yourself that Ask.com doesn't send a lot of traffic. They may not ... yet ... but they're working on it and if Google were to present their search results pages in a similar fashion to the way Ask.com does ... well ... things would really begin to get interesting.