Does design play a role in how well your website performs on the search results? It most certainly does and it's time to start paying attention or your traffic might suffer.
Google's Matt Cutts has announced that the search engine pushed out a "refresh" of the Google Page Layout algorithm around February 6.
Cutts did not indicate the degree that the change may have impacted search results, but in the opinion of quite a few SEOs, it seems to be minor.
Google's first page layout algorithm was launched in January of 2012 and followed up with an update in October of the same year. This is the third change to the design-focused algorithm, which analyzes page layout and if ads placed above the fold are excessive.
SEO folks: we recently launched a refresh of this algorithm: https://t.co/KKSXm8FqZW Visible to outside world on "Feb. 6th. - Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 10, 2014