Google Usability Tools Continue – Meet Visible Area

Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric.  It's certainly good usability practice.
Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It’s certainly good usability practice.

Google launched another tool hot on the heels of last week’s  release of Speed Tracer, a tool developers can use to determine what elements on a particular web page are slowing down its display in a browser.  And last month, we told you that a new SEO frontier for 2010 would be speed, as in how fast the site renders.

Now comes Google again with a tool that shows how much of a web site is visible for a particular monitor and video card. Browser Size is not a plugin or standalone problem.  Instead, a simple Google page allows anyone to type a web address and see how much of that page is visible to web users based on Google’s data about browser resolutions without scrolling.

Tools like this have existed for a long time, but not with built in Google metrics. Refinements will come.  Some sites will receive more visitors from people with smaller or larger screen resolutions.  Imagine the site designed for a certain width that receives a larger percentage of visitors with smaller resolutions?  Might Google someday begin penalizing such sites or demoting their ranking when the search engine knows the browser resolution as it displays the search engine results?

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