Is removing Ads can Improve your SEO

In search for my next article I was swimming in different webmaster forums pools and suddenly one thread attracted me.

One of the forum members asked a question:

“What is the general opinion about SEO improvement after removing all ads from a website?” In more simpler words

“Does it improve your ranking in SERP if you remove all ads from your blog or website?”

One of the members posted in response of the question that he had a client’s site that tanked during Google Penguin (almost 90% traffic loss).Main source of revenue for site was AdSense.

He pulled the AdSense to see if that did anything and within 2 weeks his clients traffic had almost recovered.

He added the ads back on and traffic died again almost overnight. Every time whenever he removed the ads, it took 2-4 weeks to recover the traffic.

Most funniest part in the thread discussion was, one of the member reported the similar behaviour for his Adult site that means

“Google finds AdSense to be ‘lower quality’ than adult content”.

After reading the whole discussion I tried look on Google about the possible reason that can affect your SERP due to ads.

When Ads can affect your SERP?

1- Ads above the fold- Google has launched its algorithm change for ‘Ads Position’ and clearly mentioned that all the website should not put any kind of ads above the fold.

Most of the people reported that when they visit a page that they found on Google Search, they found the searched content on the bottom of page because there were lots of ads on the top and they have to use scrollbar to find the content.

So Google introduced this ‘Above the fold penalty’.

Blogging Tips- Put your ads unit in the middle of your content or in the bottom to avoid Google above the fold penalty.

2- Too many Ads on page- Too many ads lead to keep your visitor away from your blog or website. Let me explain:

Suppose you visited a page through Google Search and noticed that there are lots of ads and content is not easily readable, in that case you just come back to search engine to explore other website. This activity increase your Bounce Rate and Google capture this user sample as negative data (Google assume that content on your site is not suitable for that search query). If it happens frequently then it affect your ranking in search engine.

3- Ratio between Ads and Content- Although there is no written proof of this but based on user interaction people don’t like pages full of ads with very less content.

What happens when you remove the ads from your page?

Improve Page load speed (Java script code to add third party ads code increase the     execution time of page load).

Low bounce rate, as people found content easily on your site
One of the forum members shared his experience, after removing ads completely from his site he noticed

Page load speed was greatly improved, from 3 seconds down to 1.5 seconds.

Page SEO improved greatly on all of the popular testing sites, a 100% score in most cases.
No immediate change but traffic ramped up 21% above what I expected over the next 5 weeks.
More engaged visitors.
Lower bounce rate

No Ads = No Revenue (Then Why I blog?)

I know that most of the bloggers and website owners work on their blog/website so that they can earn some passive income from it. Removing the ads from it means there will be no revenue then why one should go for blogging and all?

Purpose of writing this article is not to suggest remove ads completely from a blog or website but our purpose is share the right way of using and placing ads without hampering your SERP and visitors interest.

Blogging Tips for placing ads

Don’t put ads above the fold.

Put ads in the middle and in the bottom of content.

Don’t try to mix your content and ads (black hat SEO).

Try to use text ads instead of image and video ads as it keep your page load as low as possible.
Use reasonable ads unit on your page (Google AdSense suggest max 3 ads unit/page).
Super Blogging Tips- Provide quality content that resolve your visitors queries and issue. Great content can compensate your loss due to ads placement.

Blogging Tips- Always remember if your visitor don’t like your page because of wrong placement or overloaded ads then you will not get any visitor and no visitor means no earning.