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
-
Need suggestion: What is the best internal linking structure for our website to gain in SEO & UX too?
Hi all, We have 3 different editions of our product we are selling with 20 features. 1st edition & 2nd edition comes with 15 features in which 10 are common in each edition. 3rd edition comes with all 20 features. Now what's the best way to interlink and show the navigational menu to highlight 3 editions and features as well? Much appreciated if some one refer me a website with such structure. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains
Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B. We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top. To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain. At the moment we have the structure like this: domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us and domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us. I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP? All information on this topic is more than welcome 🙂
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?
Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap0 -
SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images. It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?
Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices1 -
I am looking to improve my on page seo, can you provide any recommendations or suggestions for how?
I am relatively new to the world of SEO and recently built a new site. I have read as many books as I can to help increase my skill set rapidly, and have attempted to implement the best of what I have learned but I know many of you have been in this arena for a while and I would be extremely appreciative of any suggestions you can offer with regard to on page. Thanks in advance. http://luxuryhomehunt.com - home page http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/orlando.html - city level http://luxuryhomehunt.com/homes-for-sale/orlando/bay-hill.html - community level
Web Design | | Jdubin0 -
How about some SEO tips for small local businesses
The amount of time I hear people say write good content and people will naturally link to you. I appreciate this must be valid for large websites that a driven by content. However, it doesn't really hold much hope for smaller businesses with just service information etc. I work for a small business that does web design in the UK. However, I'm finding it difficult to do any sort of link building. In my opinion nobody is going to link to any of our content naturally or if it is, its going to be small time. Our rankings have dropped slightly (only to 4th in our local county). I've done the following thinks to try get it back up there but its having little or no results. Adding us to local business directories External Articles on site Cleaned up some duplicate title tags. What link building can I do? Is link building the home page sometimes not always the way to go? What content can I write that google will like? See what I mean? My rankings did climb a little bit but then dropped straight back down to their original places 2 weeks later. Help would be appreciated.
Web Design | | sanchez19600 -
Negative Margins - Image Navigation
I created a good navigation but can't replicate it with html or css so I might have to stick to images. What would you recommend as a best practice for images in navigation? This site doesn't need to rank really high, it's mostly for a portfolio.
Web Design | | BeTheBoss0 -
Old links in Google, new website affecting SEO?
Hi Guys, I have launched my website in october and it has already been indexed by google. Now I'm going to launch my redesign which comes with a new structure, content, links, etc. So the question is, do I have to resubmit my website to google to get rid of old links? Onsite Explorer shows links to my forum which has been spammed with p* stuff which has been already indexed as well. The forum is off now. I want to use SEOmoz to track my new website but I guess this could be a hard thing as old links etc will be shown as well. Is there any tool to let Google know about my changes? Does it affect my SEO in any way? Thank you for your help. Nick
Web Design | | NickITW0