Can including advertising slots have a negative effect on SEO?

[Peter264]

Can including advertising slots at the top and side of pages have a negative effect on SEO?

Can Google detect these advertising slots?  Can they work our advertising pixels to page content pixels ratio?

Any ideas, suggestions, comments and opinions are greatly appreciated!

[RyanKent]

Advertising can negatively affect SEO.

Anything which negatively impacts the user experience can affect SEO in our post-Panda world.

To minimize the negative impact of advertisements be sure they are done tastefully. Pop-up ads, ads that play with volume, or any ad that is annoying should definitely be avoided.

[MarieHaynes]

My theory is that the number of ads you have doesn't affect where you stand in the Google Algorithm.  However, a page that is littered with ads is much less likely to attract links and therefore won't rank as well.

[RyanKent]

There isn't the hard science we would like on this topic (i.e. a Q&A from Matt Cutts). There is a bit of discussion you may find interesting: http://www.site-reference.com/articles/%E2%80%9Cdo-ads-affect-rankings%E2%80%9D

The way I see it Panda is an effort to break away from the traditional means of ranking and move towards a more algorithmic approach which aligns with what user's like. It's clear most of the best, respected sites that user's like are corporate sites, government sites, schools, wikipedia, etc. that do not contain ads.

I've read quite a bit on Panda and it is my understanding user's rated sites, then Google's programmers try to compare the higher ranked sites as a group, and the lower ranked sites as a group, then determine measurable differences. Based on the process I believe advertisements either are or will be a ranking factor.

[MarieHaynes]

I've seen a lot written that theorizes that Panda punished sites with lots of ads, but I personally believe that this is not true.  I think that many poor quality sites have lots of ads, but it's not the ads that got them Pandalized, rather the poor quality that did.

I have a site that is quite ad heavy and after each Panda installment my site's traffic increased significantly!

[KeriMorgret]

Google made a post in their Webmaster Central blog about what makes a quality site, and offered a number of questions for people to think about in relation to a site or a page on a site. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

One of the questions was "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?" which would make me think they look at ads to some degree.

[reilly3000]

If you do participate in an ad network or sell ads directly, make an effort to ensure that they are "brand-friendly" and won't drive away your users. Unsavory ads can hurt your reputation as a publisher and ultimately your rankings. That being said, lots of large ad-driven sites rank well all day long, even post-panda. Great content and ads your users find useful is a great strategy. For example, I not only don't mind the ads that are on SmashingMagazine.com, I actually find them useful as they keep me in the loop on products I really use to build my business.

[RobMay]

Essentially, keep your site design around the "user experience" as this is a post-panda world. Don't overload it with blocks of advertising, breaking up the page, content, layout and user experience. The Keep It Simple (KIS) strategy usually works best for me when it comes to running ads on sites, within the user interface/design.

NEVER use more than 1 block on a site's page as I looks "spammy" and cluttered.. As a user myself, I immoderately click back or out of a site that I find is running more than 1 block of ads. The page just looks terrible.

You might also want to consider A/B split testing of different landing or home pages. This will allow you to rey different layouts to get the best results on both, where the ads perform, and as well as the user conversion model for the sites content and lead generation.

Another note to keep in mind is to reduce the blocks of ads running relevant to the content of the market/site you are working in. Don't run open Adwords capaigns on sites for just "anything" to generate clicks. If your running a bike store website, keep the AD's targeted people in the "bike" industry. Keep the ads filtered and related on your site's side to the market content you are optimizing for.

Remember, in post-Panda, it's the user experience that the quality teams are looking to improve.