Welcome back, this is John Locke and today I'm answering a great question
that I saw a SEO forum, which is, "How many ads are too many, before I start
getting Google penalized? Before my SEO starts getting hurt? Will ads hurt my SEO?"
Something interesting to look at. If you are a larger player in the space, if
you're Entrepreneur.com or Inc.com or Forbes or Vox or Huffington Post, this
probably won't hurt you as much.
(Or if you are a) similarly sized website. Those websites can withstand a little bit more
of a hit, because they're well-established.
They have a little bit more trust in Google's eyes. They have millions of
websites and links pouring into them, so their authority is going to be a little
bit higher than a blog that's trying to get off the ground. But if you're trying
to figure out how many ads is too many, think about it from a user
experience standpoint. If you just have a regular banner ad up at the top, and
maybe a couple in the sidebar, that's not going to hurt. But if the ads start
overlapping the content, if they start interfering with people trying to read
the content, and it's a really bad user experience? Then yeah, that is going to
affect your SEO, especially if you are a newer blog, and not one of these
established players. Earlier this year, Google said that they would start
punishing sites a little bit more if they had interstitials, which is if
you're familiar with Forbes, and there's other sites that do it too, but if you go
to the page, and then there's a full-page thing that says "here is an ad, and you can
continue the site in ten seconds" -- those sorts of things are interstitials. Those are inadvisable.
Some of these larger sites can withstand the hit from that a little
bit better. But anything where it's bad for user experience is not
advisable. I've seen a lot of sites that are smaller than some
of the ones that I mentioned, and they're completely overflowed with ads, where
the ads are overlapping the content .Just so many ads that you can
barely even see the page.That that type of thing I would not recommend.
I would try and balance it out in a way that's a little bit tasteful.
If you have a banner ad at the top, maybe one at the very bottom of
the the content, maybe some in the sidebar, and it's not obstructing the
view of the content, I would say that's probably okay. I believe that
Google looks at the percentage of screen size that the ads are taking up.
That's something else to consider. I don't know the exact percentage on that,
but if you have more ad space than you do content space, that's probably a bad sign.
Keep (the ads) at just a tasteful minimum. Use common sense, because you want to
keep people coming back to your blog. Especially if you're trying to grow it,
and you're not one of these large established websites. I hope that answers
this question. My name is John Locke and my business is Lockedown Design and SEO.
Normally we're here every day answering questions for industrial and
manufacturing SEO. I just like to tackle some of these other SEO questions from
time to time. I would love to see you subscribe. If you have a question,
leave it in the comments below. I'll be happy to answer. That's all I
have for now. Until next time, peace.