Too Many Ads on Your Website Could Harm SEO

Google will be paying more attention to the ads on websites. The search engine’s goal is to penalize websites that abuse of advertising, said Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, during his keynote session at PubCon in Las Vegas.

Google Penalizes Ad Heavy Pages

Google’s search algorithm will be able to analyze the proportion of ads, as well as their visibility compared to the real content of the page.

Ad heavy websites usually make it difficult for users to find good content on web pages, notably because ads usually obscure content. 

Others websites that abuse of advertising also try to fool users in making them believe ads are part of the content, especially affiliated websites that want monetize their website by generating more traffic through sponsored links. 

In these both cases, websites may be considered as spam by Google, and see their rankings dramatically decrease.

Above The Fold Ads

Besides, displaying too many ads in the “above the fold” section of your website is also something to avoid in terms of SEO.  “Above the fold” is the area of a webpage that can be visible without scrolling. 

However, this announcement is a bit odd since Google AdSense advices you to place ads above the fold.

Google Is Not Perfect

Matt Cutts also admitted that Google’s search algorithm still occasionally makes mistakes and unfairly marks a website as spam. 

If your website has been marked as spam but you don't agree with this decision, you can report the problem to his team of spam experts.

SEO always evolving

As Matt Cutts noticed, “SEO will always be evolving”. Google strives to deliver a better search experience to users with better, fresher, and more personalized results.

After every update on search algorithmic or release of new Google service such as Google Instant, everyone wonders whether SEO is dead, or even whether SEO is spam.

Well, SEO survived Panda update, and will survive Google’s latest search algorithm update that allows users to get fresher results.

Read more about our SEO tips for Google and Baidu.