ken_b - 6:18 pm on Jan 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

Any ad on the left side, I imagine, is risky.

I wondered about that when this thread first started.

But I've got a bunch of pages with a 160x600 right under the site logo in the left column and a 120x600 in the right column right under a site nav button. There is a 728x90 leaderboard at the top of the page [above the logo and nav bar].

So far tose pages are doing fine. Maybe they just haven't got to me yet.

On the other hand, when talking to the AdSense Optimizer person about those pages they mentioned the right hand 120x600 as the ad to (re)move if any.

On pages where I don't have ads in the left column they suggested moving the skyscraper from the right column to the left column.

My biggest group of pages has the leaderboard at the top of the page above the Logo and nav bar. The in the left column there is the H1 followed by a short paragraph of text, then a 160x90 adlinks unit the more text. In the center column is an image followed by a 300/336x250/280 adblock then another image (on some pages). Then some boiler plate disclaimers etc.

Then in the right hand column I have more site nav. The pages in this section are getting more traffic. The rest of the site is stable as far as traffic goes.

Maybe I've just been beaten so far down by Panda that they are leaving me alone... :)

I'm waiting for a while to see what happens before I make any changes.

I do actively manage the ad to content ratio on my pages though.

The 728x90 stays on all pages, but how many other ads appear depends on how much content is on that particular page. That sounds like a pain, but I build all my pages manually and the ads are in the template, I just delete the ads when I think it is appropriate.