Removed ads, shot up to #2

[Play_Bach]

I have an eight year old site which has done very poorly in the SERPS the entire time I've been running it. Since earnings have been trivial, I figured I'd remove the ads and see what happens. Much to my surprise, the site is now at #2 of some 20,000,000 returns for the very same highly competitive keyword search that's never worked before. Interesting.

[brinked]

Interesting. What made you to suddenly decide on removing the ads?

Can you provide more information? Very much interested in this. Maybe it was the type of ads you were running?

What kind of ads were you running? When did you remove them? What type of site do you have and about how many pages is it?

Congrats on your boost.

[chrisv1963]

I removed a lot of ads almost a month ago, just after Panda. It didn't help at all. I am now putting them back.

[Play_Bach]

> I removed a lot of ads almost a month ago,

I removed all of them, the site has no ads. Perhaps sites without ads are now getting better positioning simply because they're not trying to sell anything. Hard to see this as just a coincidence, though I guess that's a possibility.

[chalkywhite]

If it is ads that is critical to panda then it makes no sense, 99% of people have websites to make money...if we cannot make money on a website then people just wont bother.

[londrum]

it might not have anything to do with the ads, though.

maybe your page speed has improved now. that might improve your page views, repeat visits, visitor retention and lots of other stuff. google would measure all of that.

if you improved your page speed in other ways, but keep the ads as they were, then you might have seen a similiar improvement.

[Play_Bach]

Obviously the thing to test is to put the ads back and see if the site falls, but I'm not ready to do that yet.

Now that the site is in such a prime spot, I'd like to see just how much more traffic it gets before making any more changes. Again, this is a very competitive niche which until yesterday my site was all but invisible in. So far, the new position is holding.

[edited by: Play_Bach at 2:49 pm (utc) on Apr 19, 2011]

[Leosghost]

99% of people have websites to make money.

Quite possibly ..although I think its probably nearer 75% ( lot of the web is pron..possibly as much as 75% ..and they are not selling ads .nor do they run adsense ..)..but not all of the non pron sites make their money via ads either ..and those that do don't all use adsense.

Loads are selling their own product ..and not running ads at all.

Common mistake is to think that everyone on the web is doing it for the same reasons as you are..that "common" mistake ..leads to making very many more .

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

If your ads immediately send a visitor running the metrics might play a role in tanking your sites rankings. If the ads didn't overwhelm however you may see no rankings change. Keep that in mind, there are no absolutes with Google.

[GlobalMax]

Like brinked, I'd be interested to know if these were AdSense ads or other types. Also, how many ad units were you using per page, and how many were above the fold?

Any other information you care to share about your site (general type, rough traffic figures, etc) would be appreciated as well. Thanks for posting.

[dazzlindonna]

Just yesterday, as a test on a site that was hit by the second round of Panda (though not too detrimentally), I removed ALL ads. The pages consisted primarily of one large square adsense ad floated to the left at the beginning of a page's content, one adsense banner ad (468x60) near the end of the content, one small 125x125 adsense block at the top of the sidebar, and one small adsense linkunit at the bottom of the sidebar. I figure it will take 2-3 weeks of spidering, indexing, and cacheing before I know if this affects anything or not, so once I know more, I'll post back here about it.

[tedster]

I think it's important for this thread to remember that we're NOT discussing a Panda casualty.

...an eight year old site which has done very poorly in the SERPS the entire time I've been running it.

If we cross up with sites that were tagged by Panda, we may well miss something important.

[brinked]

tedster, I am starting to believe google looked at ads all along. I can see how they can factor that into there formula. For panda, they might have tweaked how they view ads and which type of ads and how many are deemed acceptable. A lot of the sites hit had 8+ ads on a page, this huge number could have gotten them pushed towards panda along with other minor factors.

[tedster]

You are probably right. At least one of the patents I studied a few years ago definitely mentioned ads - in that case it involved noticing the quality of website that was willing to advertise on the site being scored. If I find the time, I'll try to dig that up again.

[seoN00B]

I have two websites created 1 month ago just for adsense..

Each page has 5 ads block. it went well averaging 300 UV per day not until last week. The two sites cannot be found in Google. I tried searching the cache or even the URL. It cannot be found.

I will try to remove all the Google Ads now and let see what will happen. :)

(Actually i have 5 similar sites.. two has been downed. lolz )

[walkman]

Almost all MFA sites have adsense, thus their name.
If google spam team wanted a clear signal, adsense is probably the clearest. Of course many great sites have adsense but almost all MFA crappy sites have lots of adsense blocks.

[crobb305]

I changed out one of my affiliate links, in my php redirect file, using a new parameter name for the new link. I deleted the old parameter. The page that I link from dropped an average 250 positions since the change (last Thursday). My site only has 2 different affiliate links (that can be found on just 3 pages out of over 100), so I don't consider it "thin affiliate" but it would appear that Google didn't like the addition of the new link with a new redirect parameter. It could be an overlap period (while the old link gets purged and the new one becomes accepted).

[bumpski]

I think it's important for this thread to remember that we're NOT discussing a Panda casualty.

...an eight year old site which has done very poorly in the SERPS the entire time I've been running it.

If we cross up with sites that were tagged by Panda, we may well miss something important.

Perhaps we're just discussing a Panda beneficiary?

If the site was slowly crawled it might be coincidence that the rankings improved just as the ads were removed.

But page load performance certainly could be a major factor and one would have to look at the onload event time before the ads were removed.
Of course Webmaster Tools, Labs, Performance should provide some historical data of "OnLoad" times. It is possible to code your pages so the ads don't affect the "onload" time.

[dazzlindonna]

as a test on a site that was hit by the second round of Panda (though not too detrimentally), I removed ALL ads. The pages consisted primarily of one large square adsense ad floated to the left at the beginning of a page's content, one adsense banner ad (468x60) near the end of the content, one small 125x125 adsense block at the top of the sidebar, and one small adsense linkunit at the bottom of the sidebar.

Remember that? I did that on the 18th. Right now, 3 days later, the main phrase that lost ranking has returned. The rest of the phrases have not, but the main one has. Will it stay? I don't know. Just thought I'd pass along the info.

[brinked]

One of my sites just shot up as well after removing adsense ads, made a thread for it.

It didnt get higher rankings than pre panda, but they are very similar, some lost a position or two, but its back!

[tedster]

Here's link to the thread where brinked posted the details: [webmasterworld.com...]

[brinked]

thanks ted. I think soon enough we should start a thread dedicated to all who recovered from panda. How they did it and why they feel they recovered.