What does "region above the fold" mean?

Question

On the page of google developers there are several citations to this term: "Structure your HTML to first load only critical content, from region above the fold" What would this region above the fold be? what part of HTML would it be?

Answer 1

"Above the fold, "or top fold of the page, refers to the portion of the page that users can see without scrolling to its bottom. This term is usually linked to the display of advertisements on pages.

The recommendation of Google now is that the content is always highlighted first and that it occupies as much space as possible next to the layout structure. The most important thing is that the content appears above the folds.

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But, what if I want to highlight the ads instead of the content in the first fold? What will happen?

Google will "punish" your website.

Your site will be shown at a lower level in Google results, hence you will have a lower number of visitors coming from Google results. And, per table, a smaller number of pageviews.

But, if the focus is only the financial result (how much $/R$ the site yields), it should be noted whether it is more advantageous to be in a worse position in searches and have less pageviews or be better ranked and have fewer ads.

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Above the fold

Interesting post about ad placement.

Answer 2

"Above the fold" is the content that goes on display without you having to do it scroll down to the mouse; "fold" ("fold") is the name given to the content that appears when you do scroll down