Does Adsense above the fold affects ranking?

[tabish]

Hi all,

I heard about affiliate banners, but does Adsense above the fold also affects the ranking?

Any experience with this guys?

Regards

[Zivush]

Could be.
Read this - [seroundtable.com...]


+ this study: [searchmetrics.com...]

[edited by: Zivush at 1:11 pm (utc) on Sep 26, 2013]

[netmeg]

Depends on how much content is also above the fold, and how much content is on the entire page.

[tabish]

I strongly believe that now..

I got a personal message from Adsense team in India and that guy called me up to help me to monetize my traffic. he given me few advice over phone and then i told him to mail me all the details, he took screen shots of my pages and pointed me where to put adsense banners.

I followed his advice and just after doing this.. almost 2 weeks after that.. I started loosing all my traffics and I reached from 8000 unique to 700 unique. I was very much worried about what went wrong, then somewhere in a forum i read about the adsense placement above the fold.

I removed all the adsense and just put one adsense ad below the fold.. at the bottom of my page, and you will not believe within 3 days my traffic went to normal and even increased. for almost 2 years i was loosing traffics but after doing this adsense removal, I started gaining position as I was in back in 2010

My bounce rate got better, traffic is also increasing and I have started getting the positions where I was in 2010.

a BIG no no to adsense advisers, they seriously do not know anything about their own search algorithms.

[1script]

I got a personal message from Adsense

Every single piece of advice I ever got from the AdSense team in 10 years I've been a publisher has been detrimental to my business either through diminished earnings or through ad placement hurting traffic. You can safely discard everything AdSense team is telling you (except of course anything related to policy violations) - that department of Google seems to be largely staffed by recent college graduates that have no experience in running a site, let alone any kind of business. Their advice is usually at best naive - I have no reason to believe they care enough for it to be deliberate - it's usually just sheer ignorance. Despite being able to access mountains of actionable information, they don't seem to make any use of it when they "consult" you, even on things as basic as ad sizes.

As far as the effect of their suggested changes on the overall site traffic - they simply have to clue. This is in part because of internal policies - the oft mentioned and loudly celebrated firewall between the AdSense and the search team seems to be very real and actually very bad for publishers because it makes the AdSense team so bad at understanding the effect of their work on the site's standing in Google search. But on a more general level, every time I talk to any of AdSense ladies (they seem to be almost exclusively young women in mid 20s-30s) - I get a sense that they simply don't give a damn about your business.

[EditorialGuy]

the oft mentioned and loudly celebrated firewall between the AdSense and the search team seems to be very real and actually very bad for publishers because it makes the AdSense team so bad at understanding the effect of their work on the site's standing in Google search.

The firewall is actually good for publishers--or at least for publishers who realize that an advertising rep isn't likely to be an official spokesperson for Google's search quality or anti-spam teams.

As publishers, we're responsible for our own decisions. And it's worth remembering the old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

[martinibuster]

...almost 2 weeks after that.. I started loosing all my traffics

Thanks for sharing that information. :)

Did you notice what kind of traffic was lost? Did you lose keyword positions across the board from long tail phrases to big keyword phrases? Or was the loss confined to just a few big keywords, with longtail phrases remaining intact?

Was there any change for traffic from other search engines?

[1script]

"If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

I did not suggest that AdSense team should be advising people on how to improve their rankings. But I think it would be fair to expect them to not give out advise that's outright damaging to publishers, you know, along the lines of "left hand knows what the right hand is doing".

[EditorialGuy]

I think it would be fair to expect them to not give out advise that's outright damaging to publishers, you know, along the lines of "left hand knows what the right hand is doing".

Sure, and it would be great if the driver of a Coke truck could tell you Coca-Coca's secret formula. But that isn't how things work in big organizations.

As Web publishers, we're responsible for our sites. If we let greed get in the way of common sense, we have only ourselves to blame.

[netmeg]

I've actually gotten good personal recommendations from AdSense that improved revenue. I've also gotten personal recommendations that I chose not to implement, for one reason or another. As EditorialGuy says, you're responsible for your site, and you need to make the common sense decision.

[tabish]

As Web publishers, we're responsible for our sites. If we let greed get in the way of common sense, we have only ourselves to blame

You are right .. but everyone is not smart enough to make decisions when a person calls from Google and tells to do the changes. I thought that if they are Googler they know better than me and i followed their recommendations.

Ask anyone, almost 99% owner will follow the advice if that is given by Google and that too over phone. We may ignore emails we receive but we take personal calls seriously, don't we?

But as you say.. we all learn by our mistakes and every bad experience makes us wise only. I have no complaint from Google, it was me who should have given a second thought.

[tabish]

Did you notice what kind of traffic was lost? Did you lose keyword positions across the board from long tail phrases to big keyword phrases? Or was the loss confined to just a few big keywords, with long tail phrases remaining intact?

The loss was slowly and it started back in 2010. My site was doing very well and i was getting good money out of Adsense and affiliates. Then I started receiving mails from google with the screen shots of websites telling me where to put more ads to get more revenue. revenue increased but then slowly my traffic started falling. By and by i was getting less visitors. Then my old good pages, that were receiving good traffics started disappearing from Google (with all the key phrases, specially short one) I never noticed that it was due to adsense I placed, but now when i look back, i can realize that it was due to that only.

My competitors have too many ads above the fold but they are still doing well, that may be because they are huge sites than mine.

It worked for me somehow.. but I can't say if it will work for everyone.

[graeme_p]

The Searchmetrics study is utterly meaningless. A key rule in statistics is that "correlation does not imply causation".

In this case, all they have proved is that sites with lots of ads are low ranking sites: it does not prove that they rank low because they have lots of ads. It may be that sites that have lots of ads are MFAs with terrible content, it may be that people are reluctant to link to sites with lots of ads, it may be that site owners are more willing to risk having lots of ads on low ranking sites, it may be that some sites or some forms of advertising, or some ad layouts are penalised and not others, it may be that the top ranked sites for many keywords are not for profit or have a business model (e.g. selling their own stuff) that does not require ads. Most likely it is a combination of all of the above, and good luck guessing what matters for a particular site.

That said, if the site looks dominated by ads, its generally not a good thing.