4 Ways Ads Can Affect Your Site

Even though Google has recently lifted its AdSense’s three ad unit limit on a page, this should not be understood as an invitation to add an unlimited number of ads to your page. Believe it or not, having too many ads can be a bad thing not only for users but also for search engines.

Too Many Ads Make Your Site Less Profitable… In the Long Run

Including lots of ads in your site will definitely help you make more money in the short term. However, they can cause the site to get dragged down in resource calls, uncompressed image downloads and excessive scripting. In other words, all of these combined make your site’s page take longer to download, providing a less appealing user experience.

As a result, users avoid visiting your site, they don’t see your ads or click on them and your organic reach is affected.

Spiders Don’t Like Ads

Spiders are not big fans of ads as they can become potential obstacles when they try to crawl your site. Ads make spiders work extra hard to get to your content and, with so much content to crawl anywhere else, it’s just easier for them to move on the next site on their list.

It is well known that Google allots a certain “crawl budget” for each site and if yours consumes too many resources, it becomes a potential place for the spider to dump out.

In addition, having too many ads may lead to scripting errors or you may detect that your ad network fails to compress images. If the search engine crawler has to wait for the content of your site to load, it is very likely that it stops indexing your site.

Google May Look Down On Your Site

Back in 2012 Google announced the “Top Heavy Algorithm”; in other words, an algorithm designed to prevent those sites that were too heavy with ads from ranking well in its listings. Now that the 3 ad per page is lifted, it is very likely that Google evaluates this algorithm a bit differently. In other words, if your site renders more ads than content, Google will probably make it more difficult for you to rank it in relevant positions for search engine query results.

Ads Turn Off Your Audience

By creating slow page loads, ad heavy design, blocking content and other bad ad practices such as auto-playing videos, users get turned off at increasing rates.
This is just one of the reasons why more and more users have increasingly adopted ad blocking tools.

POLARIS is an international SEO agency, for helpful tips and advice or a for a free audit please contact info@polarisagency.co.uk