Are three Adsense ads on a long page a negative for search ranking?

[bizzer]

I've not a site whose home page that is #1 for a popular keyword. The page is 1200 words, plus comments following.  It's a clean page with no popups, and has one large rectangle Adsense ad above the fold (lots of text around this ad, and a very high percentage of page ATF is text), and another large rectangle Adsense ad that is midway down the article (after you have to page twice to get there).  So, it's a very low ad to text ratio and ATF looks very clean.

I have room for one more Adsense ad closer to the bottom of the article, which would be about five page downs through the page.  My question is, will placing another ad way down the page affect my ranking in any negative way?  I'm so pleased with my #1 ranking I hesitate to add it.  But the page converts in Adsense so well, and heat maps show a large number readers do read all the way down the page, so I'd like to pick up some more ad revenue.

[David-Kley]

If your ads negatively affect the users experience, then yes it could hurt your page interaction. What you are describing sounds very conservative, and I doubt it affects your page at all. Even if you had more ads, as long as they are out of the way and do not intrude on the user you should be fine.

Ads do not affect your page rank or position in any way. If that was the case, plenty of sites would be non-existent.

[stevefidelity]

Most studies/reports that you'll see point to a slightly negative _correlation. _But correlation does not equal _causation. _One that I recently remember reading pointed to a negative correlation when Google authorship markup was present. It's obviously very hard to argue that adding Google authorship markup to your site _decreases _your organic search rankings.

[EGOL]

I believe that Adsense can negatively influence your rankings. That can happen if the adsense causes the visitor to scroll before seeing your content or causes the visitor to have a hard time recognizing your content. What you describe is very very conservative. Should not cause any problem.

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

Adsense doesn't affect ranking in either a positive or negative way, Google freely admits they keep them completely separate (otherwise everyone would just chuck Adsense on theirs sites to get number one in Google).

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9717?hl=en-GB

Having three ads on a page doesn't seem to excessive IMO, but without seeing the page its a bit hard to tell.