Earlier today I passed by a site that was offering a “start a blog competition”, where the first person to reach the $3000 income goal would win a fifty dollar gift card. There was no runner up prizes as the promoters felt achieving the $3K threshold was a pretty good consolation prize in off itself.

While the lure of easy money in tough economic times may be appealing, new bloggers and website owners in general, may want to consider Google new search algorithm formula is taking punitive actions against websites that flood the top of their web pages with adverts.

According to Google, sites layouts where the visitors have to scroll down to finally view the relevant contents on the page annoys the users. Google will be penalizing those websites through search results and pagerank.

Google does state that if you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as the site is re-crawled by the search engine bots. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

The best advice for publishers is to continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience which starts with a good web hosting company and a fast loading website. This change is just one of the over 500 "improvements" Google expect to roll out to their search algorithm this year.

As is often the case in these type scenarios, the real winner of the “start a blog competition” would be the increased traffic to the site offering the prize!