Google’s John Mueller said on a webmaster hangout this morning that white space pushing content down for design and layout purposes is not an issue for SEO or ranking in Google. He said the issue really revolves around having ads where it is hard to find the content on the page that the searcher is looking for.

John is talking about the top heavy penalty from 2012 and the mobile interstitials penalty from 2016.

But using white space, as part of your user experience, to make your site better for your users, that is fine.

John said this at the 4:18 mark into the video.

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