How Many Ads Can I Put On My Site?

By AffiliatesCenterBlog On January 26, 2012 Under SEO Tips

A reader recently asked us what is now a very pertinent question…“how many ads can I put on my site?” Well, that question probably should be how many ads can I put on my webpage? You see, there are changes happening on the number of ads a visitor sees when he first lands on a page.

For example, if you have been taught that your advertising needs to be at the top of the page or above the fold, then you are asking for trouble. Google is going to be coming after you.

Why?

Well, it all gets down to user experience and Google is big on this. Now we are talking about those webmasters who literally take liberties and have all their ads above the fold…in other words, all you can see are ads and no content. This will get you penalized.

It’s about having content above the fold; content that the user is looking for. If they type in a search phrase and are taken to a site where all they see when they first land on it is ads, then they are going to quickly click away. That’s a bad user experience for Google. But if they come to a site where the title and content below it is the first thing they see and they stay on the site, then that’s fine. And from what we can gather, having ads above the fold in this situation should be okay.

There is an excellent report on this at searchengineland.com. In fact, it’s somewhat of guide to how many ads you can have above the fold of your site and could be the most important ten minutes you spend in front of your computer today.

What happens if you’re hit? Make changes, then wait a few weeks.

Similar to how last year’s Panda Update works, Google is examining sites it finds and effectively tagging them as being too ad-heavy or not. If you’re tagged that way, you get a ranking decrease attached to your entire site (not just particular pages) as part of today’s launch.

If you reduce ads above-the-fold, the penalty doesn’t instantly disappear. Instead, Google will make note of it when it next visits your site. But it can take several weeks until Google’s “push” or “update” until the new changes it has found are integrated into its overall ranking system, effectively removing penalties from sites that have changed and adding them to new ones that have been caught.

Google’s post explains this more:

– If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes.

– How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content.

– On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site…..

Click here to visit the original source of this post

So, still confused on how many ad you can have on your page? Don’t be. That article pretty much explains what you can and cannot do. More rules? Yes, but I think this makes some sense. The old days when sites were loaded with adsense and no content are gone; it also seems the days where ads dominate above the fold of a website could be gone also.

Let us know what you think and whether this is a restrictive or another “big brother” type move by the big “G”.

Meanwhile, have you downloaded your free copy of Traffic Launch Pad yet? Not sure how much longer it might be available but this is a tool that also has a Pro version and could be restricted for access soon.

Click here to download your free copy of Traffic Launch Pad.