Do country-specific adverts hurt rankings?

[UserFriendly]

I use Geolocation to vary the adverts that my site shows to visitors from different countries. UK visitors will see ads (graphic and text) from UK companies, while US visitors will see ads from US companies.

Does this harm ranking in engines like Google?

[tedster]

I would guess that it all depends on the execution, but certainly Google handles getting a different ad on every spidering with no problems. There are bazillions of sites doing it.

I would suggest you make sure the ad is in a dedicated block-level element in the html (high level is best, such as <div> or <td> rather than <p>) and not just as a run-on with the rest of the page mark-up.