Recently, Google announced that it was removing AdSense’s three ad unit limit on a page. This decision seems to have been largely driven by a “mobile first” strategy, as mobile sites don’t have the same limitations as desktop in terms of space and user interaction. Scrolling is not as likely a deterrent on mobile sites. This leaves more space for ads inside the “page.”
So, time to celebrate! Let’s go put more ads in the page and make more money! That seems to be the prevailing thought, but perhaps that mindset is misguided. Not only is this against the spirit of Google’s guidelines, it’s also just not a sustainable strategy long-term. In fact, more ads can often mean less money in the long run.
How can this be, though? Are ads killing your website?
1. Death by the numbers
It would seem logical that the more ads a webmaster puts on the site, the more money the site owners will make. However, this is often not the case — at least, not long term.
While more ads will make more money in short term, they can cause the site to get dragged down in resource calls, uncompressed image downloads, and excessive scripting. All of these add to your site’s page weight — and ultimately, downloading a page laden with ads could be like swimming in a pool of molasses. That’s true even when the ads like Google’s AdSense are loaded in the background.
2. Spiders are lazy
Every ad becomes a potential obstacle not only for users, but for the spiders trying to crawl your site. Spiders don’t like to be slowed down, and they are especially unhappy when they have to work extra hard to get to your content. Make that spider feel like he is pummeling a rock pile on a hot day, and he is likely to just move on to the next site.
Colloquialisms aside, there is a lot of content out there, and the spiders use a lot of resources. Overload them, and they move on out of necessity.
Why?
Google has what is known as a “crawl budget.” Simply put, crawl budget is the amount of resources Google will use to index your site. There is no specific, set limit to the crawl budget, as every site is unique. However, every resource call is a potential place for the spider to dump out of the crawl of your site because of excessive trips to the server and back causing delays in page render.
Delays in page rendering
Ad network fail to compress images? Are there scripting errors? Are you loading content after your advertising, forcing the crawler to wait for the rest of the DOM? All of these are situations where the crawler is likely to stop indexing your site.
One client of mine started with only 300k pages indexed. We fixed their ad issues, and now Google regularly crawls a couple of million. Ads themselves are not the issue, but they can create issues if not implemented intelligently.
3. Are you top heavy?
No, this isn’t about overdoing your chest flys. Back in 2012, Google announced the “Top Heavy” algorithm, which was designed to prevent sites that were “top heavy” with ads from ranking well in its listings.
The recent change to Google’s AdSense rules suggests that they may now be looking at the pages differently. Instead of a limit of 3 AdSense units per page, Google will now be taking a more general negative view on “pages with more advertising than publisher-provided content.” But what does this mean?
This means that there will be potential devaluations for pages that contain more ads than content. So when you view your page as rendered, what do you see — page content or advertising? Be safe and make sure your page content is the dominant visual.
4. Burn it, burn it with fire
Some ad practices are so negative that users have started to avoid sites that have these ad types. These are ads like the auto-play video with sound, the auto-play video without sound, the disappearing auto-play, and (the worst of the worst) the disappearing auto-play video with sound that turns on even if the user had the sound turned off.
There is only one bit of advice here, and that is this: If you use any of these on your site, remove them. Seriously, you are not likely getting the return you think you are. It is more likely users are just trying to turn it off and clicking through by accident. However, you are likely angering them.
Just don’t, ever use any of these. The only one that is tolerable is the video without sound, but it is still annoying, so really just don’t.
5. Burning man
In paying homage to the big man set on fire in the desert this time of year, this is the most important aspect of how ads are destroying your site. Burn rates.
What are burn rates?
Burn rates are how fast you turn off your audience due to bad site practices, especially in advertising. By creating slow page loads, ad heavy design, blocking content, and auto-playing videos, users are getting turned off at a faster and faster rate.
This has led to the growth of ad blocking. According to a recent report by PageFair and Adobe, “[t]he estimated loss of global revenue due to blocked advertising during 2015 was $21.8B.”
The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.
According to a research report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB):
[T]wo-thirds of U.S. consumers who run ad blockers could be convinced to uninstall them should the industry take some steps to change habits deemed annoying by most online users.
The IAB’s research report notes that there are some pretty simple ways to get users to turn their ad blockers off. They are to:
- Ensure that ads do not have auto-play audio or video in environments where they aren’t anticipated by the consumer.
- Make certain that ads do not block content.
- Safeguard users from malware.
- Guarantee that ads do not slow down browsing.
Not only do these make the experience better for users, but also for Google. As we know, a good user experience is a good Google experience.
So don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Making sure you are working with a proper and positive ad strategy will help prevent your site from suffering from devaluations in Google and invisibility issues with users. Remember, once a user is burned, it is nearly impossible to get them back.
Is it worth it for an extra ad space on the page?
Overall, ads can be a great way to monetize your site, but it’s important to remember that too much of a good thing can have negative consequences. Make sure you keep an eye on how ads are impacting your website and its visitors, so you can make sure your site is still providing a good experience.
Also, watch out for SEO mistakes that can affect your ranking. Which is listed below:
Poor Content Management
Content is King; this is one rule you should never forget if you want search engines to rank your website highly. Sadly, a majority of webmasters and business owners forget it, causing their ranks to drop and setting up their sites for online death. When creating content for your website, remember that there are a few things you should ensure to guarantee that your content strategy is effective and not working against SEO.
Originality –
(discussed as a separate point below)
Value –
The best thing you can do to satisfy search engines is to provide content that is valuable to your visitors and potential customers. Now this does not mean that ‘mediocre’ content will not be indexed by search engines or displayed on SERPs; sure, it is going to bring traffic if optimized well, but it may not be enough to convert your visitors into paying customers. To ensure conversions, you need to provide users with invaluable content that gets shared.
Relevancy –
The content must be related and relevant in order for your site to be seen as credible within your market niche. While current events and trending topics can be great for your business growth, you need to tie and relate these topics back to your business. If you fail to do so, you may find your site pushed down on the ranking list.
Consistency –
To maintain your visitors’ continued interest and regard with respect to your products and services, you need to offer them consistent content. Posting infrequently and on rare occasions is sure to kill your SEO ranking.
Up-to-Date –
Yesterday’s content will not help your site ranking today. Just like any other SEO practices, your content needs to be updated regularly to keep visitors engaged and ensure that they frequent your site.
All of these practices need to be integrated into your content management strategy if you do not wish to risk your site to plummet and sink.
Zero (or Little) Internal Linking
Another fatal mistake that most site owners make is ignoring the importance of internal linking and optimizing the internal pages of their sites. Sure, your homepage is important, but having all of your links going to your homepage is unnatural. In fact, it is a poor strategy to build ranking as you sacrifice page views. Because search engines determine the importance of each page with respect to how often a page is linked within your site, it is very important that you build links to your internal pages. Otherwise, you will miss out on the opportunity to create organic growth within your site.
Fortunately, this is one of the easiest issues to fix. All you need to do is to go to your website and analyze its pages based on the information on them. If one page helps or relates to another, then build internal links by incorporating them into texts. All in all, you need to ensure that at least 80% of your links are going to internal pages. That aside, make sure to connect each of your pages to your homepage or contact page. Once you make these vital changes, you will notice that the ranking of your page will start improving and the number of your page views will also start increasing.
Lack of Original Content
One of the most common mistakes made by website developers who are trying to figure out the workings of SEO is copying content from other sites. This act, which is known as plagiarism, is a no-no because Google and other search engines have explicitly stated that they will not tolerate content that violates any potential copyright infringement laws. Whether you republish articles from other sites or borrow content, duplicate content (content which exists on two different URLs) is a serious SEO mistake that devalues your links, ruins your site’s search ranking, and puts you at the risk of potential penalties.
Copying content from other sites, however, is not the only form of copy infringement. Often, SEO experts create duplicate content for their sites because they cannot come up with additional information for their sites. Using content from internal pages for their homepage or copying/pasting paragraphs from different pages of your site will reflect badly on your online reputation and search engine rankings. So, entrust content creation to a creative specialist who will not be running out of ideas too soon.
Resorting to Keyword Stuffing
Keywords and key terms have always been an important part of online searches, which is why website developers and content marketers alike use them. While keywords do carry some importance, there is a world of difference between being ‘keywords focused’ and ‘keyword stuffing’. For the sake of SEO and your site, you need to avoid inundating your readers with too many keywords. SEO is all about improving the user experience of your site. Unfortunately, cramming keywords in your content will go against this basic rule since it lowers the quality of your content, further killing your website ranking.
If you must have keywords, keep them between 1-2% of your content. However, most importantly, ensure that they flow nicely with your content. In other words, write naturally and do not let the keywords stick out. Today’s readers are smart, so they will detect any keywords you stuff, abandon your site, and lower your SEO ranking.
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