Semalt: Why Too Many Ads Can Hurt Your Google Ranking

Ranking highly on Google is one of the easiest ways to pull new traffic to your website. That's one of the reasons why SEO, or search engine optimization, has been at the center of so many businesses' marketing strategies over the past few years. Most people believe that SEO is just about monitoring the competition and trying to rank for certain keywords that your ideal audience might search for. However, there are many practices still commonplace today that can be hurting your SEO ranking more than you think.

One of the biggest culprits that could be negatively impacting your Google ranking is the number of ads you're running. Sure, ads can be a great way to bring in revenue, but if they are reducing your Google ranking, you might be missing out on some valuable organic traffic. But why do ads impact your Google ranking? We're here to teach you and tell you what you can do about it.

Semalt Is a full-scale digital agency assisting businesses across the world with their SEO strategies and overall website enhancement. Our Dedicated SEO Dashboard is one of our most popular services, offering all the tools you may need to ensure your website ranks as highly as possible. Some of our other in-demand services include AutoSEO, FullSEO, SSL, analytics, and more. In addition to our extensive service catalog, we also pride ourselves on maintaining a dedicated and experienced customer service team that goes above and beyond to assist every single client.

It's been almost a decade since Google changed its algorithm to stop top-heavy sites from getting ranked highly, but there are tons of websites that still don't realize how much of an impact this element can have. But what does it even mean for your website to be top-heavy? In short, it means that your website has more ads than it has original content.

It might seem like common sense, but you should have more original and relevant page content than you have advertisements. Google does take an average across your entire site, but in general, if your ads far outweigh standard content, your website might be penalized and be ranking lower than it should.

Having an abundance of ads on your website can also lead to incredibly slow load times for your audience, whether they are viewing your page on mobile or on a desktop. Especially if you have a lot of video ads on your website, these elements can take lots of time and effort to load. Even if you only have standard visual ads on your website, it can still impact your website speed if you have too many of them.

It seems that Google is taking loading speed into consideration more and more with every update. At one point in time, Google recommended that websites only have three ads per page, but they've since removed that recommendation. Still, it's good to consider how your ads could be impacting your site speed and consider reducing the number of ads you have on each page.

Every website has what Google calls a "crawl budget," and this budget is determined individually for every website. Your crawl budget is, essentially, the maximum number of resources that Google will allot toward indexing your site. Your website must be indexed in order for it to show up on Google search results in the first place. Whenever you make changes to your website, those changes won't reflect in search results until those particular pages have been indexed again. 

Most websites have a crawl budget that is more than sufficient. But if you have tons of ads on your website, these ads can take up more resources and eat up your crawl budget. So, Google will have fewer resources to index the rest of your site, which can make certain pages not show up in search results. This aspect of your SEO ranking is a bit more on the technical site, but it's still important for getting you noticed.  

All of the above factors impacting your Google ranking can all come down to one commonality: they all lead to a poor user experience. Think about the kind of experience you expect when you enter a website. Do you want to be bombarded with loud video ads or excessive popups? Or would you rather find maybe an ad or two that's tastefully placed and doesn't get in the way of the content you came for? 

Google puts the user experience first, much like you should. All in all, the better user experience you provide, the more that Google is going to want to promote your site to the appropriate parties. On the other hand, if you're not giving your audience something pleasant to look at, Google is not going to want to lead them to you.

Luckily, you can improve your Google rankings with just a few small tips when it comes to placing your ads. First, avoid having too many ads on your page in general but especially above the main content. After all, people are coming to your page to see that content, so they shouldn't have to encounter a ton of ads before they get there. 

Try to avoid auto-playing videos and tons of pop-ups, which can be quite annoying to your audience. Don't implement misleading ads, and don't make your audience click past tons of ads to get to the content they're looking for.

Focusing on ad placement is one way to improve your SEO, but it's just one piece of a bigger digital strategy. Semalt and our Dedicated SEO Dashboard can give you all the tools you need to see where your site is excelling and what could stand to be improved. To learn more about this platform and all the benefits it can have for your company, contact Semalt today!