Website ads can have a damaging impact on your organic rankings in the search engines. Google has recently announced that it will be removing the AdSense 3 ad unit limit that it has on pages. One of the main drivers for this announcement is the mobile first strategy. Websites that are displayed on mobiles have a lot more space for ads thanks to scrolling. Scrolling is expected on a mobile and therefore it doesn’t put people off in the same way as it does on a larger screen such as a desktop. Many people will now think they can place lots of ads on their website pages, but this isn’t the case. Yes, it is possible to do so but that doesn’t mean it’s a good decision, here’s why.
Are Ads Damaging Your SEO?
- More ads mean longer loading times and can significantly slow down website speeds. The more ads that are added means more external items the browser needs to retrieve as the page downloads. Slow sites result in poor user experiences, which is not what Google wants and therefore it can push sites down in organic search.
- Websites with too many ads are not received positively by Google. The content on the page needs to be the main focus on the page. If you have too many ads compared with the amount of content you are risking being pushed down the results page. Your content needs to be the most dominant visual on the page and outweigh the ads.
- Avoid ads that play sound or video automatically. Users hate these ads and they really have a negative impact on their experience on your website. Remove them now.
- Spiders crawl your website to index your website. When the spider is slowed down it begins using up the limited crawl budget that is allocated to your website. When the spiders have to work too hard they will quit indexing your website and this could damage your rankings.
Website ads need to be placed on your pages in a way that will not ruin the user experience. They should never be the main focus of the page and they should not slow down your website significantly or cause frustration to the user.