Does adsense help you rank organically?

[limoshawn]

Does Google give a slight (or not so slight) boost in ranking to pages that have adsense on them?

From a business stand point it would make sense, they don't want to do paid inclusion in the serps but if the top serps have adsense then Google could generate revenue.

Looking at search results for a product in one of our niches turns up the following:
1. wiki-encyclopedia (no adsense)
2. a site about stuff (made for adsense)
3. article site (made for adsense)
4. competitor site (this is the first site in the serps that actually has the product available directly) (has adsense)
5. information site (no adsense)
6. a site about How to do stuff (made for adsense)
7. information site (made for adsense)
8. competitors site (no adsense)
9. another wiki site (adsense)
10. a site about answers (adsense)

Of the first 10 serps, 7 have adsense on them. I'm sure that there's a thousand different reasons for why these sites rank where they do. I just find it interesting that there are so many sites with adsense in the top results. I also think that its funny that the highest ranking competitor (a site that actually offers the product directly) is the only competitor that has adsense on their page.

Thoughts?

[tedster]

It's an idea that gets floated a lot - but I still say it's not true. It seems like it would help make Google money, but this strategy would be suicidal for Google in the long term.

It doesn't surprise me that for some query terms we see a lot of Adsense pages in the ranking. Sites that use Adsense to make money naturally work on their content so it ranks well - because the extra traffic helps THEM. Google also continues to work on cleaning up the Adsense program and disallow low quality sites. That means a higher percentage of Adsense sites are serving good pages that can rank well.

You can test it - take a group of modestly ranking sites, get them accepted into the Adsense program, make no other changes and see if organic rankings improve. From the discussions I read in our own Adsense forum. I'm sure that it won't happen.

[limoshawn]

I agree that the MFA site work very hard to get ranking, and many are very good at it no doubt. My biggest surprise was seeing the competition with adsense on their product pages. I remember when Google was trying to get the MFA sites out of adwords and landing pages with adsense code on them got nasty quality scores. now i'm starting to see competitors, both organically and in adwords, with adsense on their product pages.

Garbage sites aside, if 2 good, relevant pages are available for a search is google going to give preference to a page with adsense over a page without. my gut says yes.

[SteveWh]

When I first launched an informational site a few years ago, it ranked fairly well at Google initially. 3 months later I put AdSense on many pages, and within 2 days my pages plummeted so far down in the rankings that they were invisible. Traffic dropped from about (as I recall) 30 visitors a day to 1-5 a day, where it stayed for about a year or more before very gradually starting to rise again.

It is normal for a new site to rank high for a short time and then plunge back down. I didn't know that at the time. Even so, the 2-day timing was stunning, and I still tend to believe that the ads either caused the drop or at least triggered its timing. The attitude I attributed to Google at the time was, "A new informational site? Great!"... later, "Oh, you want to make money from it? Well, then, no more special treatment. It's time for you to get thrown into the 'real world' and get judged by the harsher more normal rules."

I still wouldn't do it any other way. The site was intended to have ads, and I wouldn't try to pretend otherwise by leaving them off at first. I put them on as soon as I learned how. Leaving them off intentionally would be misleading and could also lead to a worse situation: wait to put the ads on until a year later when traffic is better, and then get suddenly slammed in the rankings at a time that is even worse than in the site's first few months (when it really didn't matter much).

That experience leads me to believe that Google views AdSense sites with suspicion even though it would be financially beneficial for them to rank AdSense sites higher as you described.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

SteveWh as I understand it, if this happened three months after launch this would be outside the period during which the new site boost took (takes?) place.

It does seem strange but if your experience was typical then there would be much more anecdotal evidence of this. Many people like yourself, who use Adsense are aware of their site stats and they would probably have noticed this.