Can including advertising slots have a negative effect on SEO?
-
Can including advertising slots at the top and side of pages have a negative effect on SEO?
Can Google detect these advertising slots? Can they work our advertising pixels to page content pixels ratio?
Any ideas, suggestions, comments and opinions are greatly appreciated!
-
Essentially, keep your site design around the "user experience" as this is a post-panda world. Don't overload it with blocks of advertising, breaking up the page, content, layout and user experience. The Keep It Simple (KIS) strategy usually works best for me when it comes to running ads on sites, within the user interface/design.
NEVER use more than 1 block on a site's page as I looks "spammy" and cluttered.. As a user myself, I immoderately click back or out of a site that I find is running more than 1 block of ads. The page just looks terrible.
You might also want to consider A/B split testing of different landing or home pages. This will allow you to rey different layouts to get the best results on both, where the ads perform, and as well as the user conversion model for the sites content and lead generation.
Another note to keep in mind is to reduce the blocks of ads running relevant to the content of the market/site you are working in. Don't run open Adwords capaigns on sites for just "anything" to generate clicks. If your running a bike store website, keep the AD's targeted people in the "bike" industry. Keep the ads filtered and related on your site's side to the market content you are optimizing for.
Remember, in post-Panda, it's the user experience that the quality teams are looking to improve.
-
If you do participate in an ad network or sell ads directly, make an effort to ensure that they are "brand-friendly" and won't drive away your users. Unsavory ads can hurt your reputation as a publisher and ultimately your rankings. That being said, lots of large ad-driven sites rank well all day long, even post-panda. Great content and ads your users find useful is a great strategy. For example, I not only don't mind the ads that are on SmashingMagazine.com, I actually find them useful as they keep me in the loop on products I really use to build my business.
-
Google made a post in their Webmaster Central blog about what makes a quality site, and offered a number of questions for people to think about in relation to a site or a page on a site. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
One of the questions was "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?" which would make me think they look at ads to some degree.
-
I've seen a lot written that theorizes that Panda punished sites with lots of ads, but I personally believe that this is not true. I think that many poor quality sites have lots of ads, but it's not the ads that got them Pandalized, rather the poor quality that did.
I have a site that is quite ad heavy and after each Panda installment my site's traffic increased significantly!
-
There isn't the hard science we would like on this topic (i.e. a Q&A from Matt Cutts). There is a bit of discussion you may find interesting: http://www.site-reference.com/articles/%E2%80%9Cdo-ads-affect-rankings%E2%80%9D
The way I see it Panda is an effort to break away from the traditional means of ranking and move towards a more algorithmic approach which aligns with what user's like. It's clear most of the best, respected sites that user's like are corporate sites, government sites, schools, wikipedia, etc. that do not contain ads.
I've read quite a bit on Panda and it is my understanding user's rated sites, then Google's programmers try to compare the higher ranked sites as a group, and the lower ranked sites as a group, then determine measurable differences. Based on the process I believe advertisements either are or will be a ranking factor.
-
My theory is that the number of ads you have doesn't affect where you stand in the Google Algorithm. However, a page that is littered with ads is much less likely to attract links and therefore won't rank as well.
-
Advertising can negatively affect SEO.
Anything which negatively impacts the user experience can affect SEO in our post-Panda world.
To minimize the negative impact of advertisements be sure they are done tastefully. Pop-up ads, ads that play with volume, or any ad that is annoying should definitely be avoided.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does a loading homepage animation effect rankings?
Our website ( panphoenix dot com) has a Javascript animation when you load it for the first time which takes just over 2 seconds to load. Does having this animation effect rankings negatively? Would appreciate your thoughts!Thanks Rob
Web Design | | roberthseo0 -
Do pages with low PA effect DA?
I was looking into raising my firm's Domain Authority and I had a thought. I was wondering if our very low PA pages are bringing the overall DA down? Our homepage is at 43 currently and the DA is 32. We have quite a few pages and I am trimming a little fat in the deep pages currently. I was wondering what would be the result in terms of DA I am also starting an aggressive initiative to blog more and try to attract links through guest posting and HARO (Hep A Reporter Out). I understand that many people will say DA is not a metric your should necessarily build around. But, while I am fighting for rankings in a very competitive vertical, I assume a higher DA is better, no? From everything I have read on Moz over the years, they say that the DA metric is the one that tries to encompass a multitude of factors, similar to the way something more complex like the Google algorithm does. So, I assumed finding small gains in DA could be beneficial to the site's rankings and traffic I tried to go into detail and get specific here because I know how many bad questions are asked daily. Thanks anyone and everyone for the help, I do thoroughly appreciate the Moz community
Web Design | | BossArrighi0 -
How does a Responsive Site kill SEO?
How does a Responsive Site poentially kill SEO? I've seen a few feeds on twitter how a website took a rankings dive after implementing a Responsive theme; yet, it's not clear to me what is actually going on within a Responsive site that would cause the SEO rank to tank? I can only speculate that it introduces a bunch of 404 errors, or that it changes all of the URLs into gibberish, so you loose all of the links coming into your website if not 301'ed? Can someone clarify, what are the actual mechanical issues on a Responsive website that becomes a concern to SEO? Thanks.
Web Design | | ExploreConsulting1 -
Does anyone know how much a wordpress site can store (in terms of data) I want to put all my movies on it and use it as a personal global external hard drive! Thanks!!
So basically, I have about 500 GB of movies on my computer and I don't want to buy an external hardrive. I don't want to spend the money A website I could access anytime, and anywhere, without having to carry my external with me everywhere I go. Thanks in advance for any help/ references.
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Seo for design webinar ?
I've got no problem using google webfonts on their own, but what about using them over an image; specifically a clickable image? Its easiest to place text over an image if the image is a background image, but then the image isn't easy to make clickable. Am I missing something - this shouldn't be hard, right. Thanks!
Web Design | | saultie0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Technical SEO Question about TLD combined with SubDomain
I am making a new website but need to figure out the best way to do this in terms of SEO. I would like the website to have functionality of brochure website combined with an online store. My issue is that I will be using software called prestashop for my online store and CMS called MODx to develop my brochure site. (These can not be combined into one CMS). I can create brochure site with MOdx = www.example.com & then from that a subdomain using prestashop for my online store = store.example.com Can I get Google to index these as one site or would I be better off trying to get everything under the TLD. Ideally I would like just one site without subdomain Bacially what I am asking is... What are the effects of having subdomains in terms of SEO? Am I better of having everyhitng under TLD? Can I get Google to view TLD and Sub as one site? Hope this makes sense, thank you.
Web Design | | Socialdude0 -
Does changing nameservers and a new site design affect SEO dramatically
We are about to change nameservers and upload a new website design design, completely rebuilt website to that new hosting, will this effect our seo efforts previously and have an effect on our SEO rankings?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0