Yahoo/Bing ads effect Google ranking?

[MHes]

Hi
I have shown PPC text ads from Bing (originally Overture and then Yahoo) for the last 11 years. For the past 3 years the ads have been below the fold and minimal. However, with Google now restricting referrer information (obviously to disrupt the effectiveness of competing advertising networks), I wonder whether they are now also actively penalising sites with competitors Ads on?

Any thoughts?

[FranticFish]

No idea, but it's easy to test: swap them for AdWords and see if anything changes.

[MHes]

OK, I've swopped them. Difficult to know how long to wait..... a month, 6 months, a year?!

As an aside, with Bing ads I got 1 click per 5 impressions but adsense so far gets 1:400. The rankings will need to increase a lot to justify having adsense on the pages.

[FranticFish]

I'm yet to try AdSense myself; there's obviously a huge huge difference between 20% and 0.25% CTR - is there any danger that the low(er) CTR would affect the ranking of the pages the ads are in?

I believe that you can exclude/include ads from certain providers. Can you not try to replicate the advertisers from your Bing ads within AdSense to increase CTR?

[Simsi]

Just a thought to mull over: if Google rankings improved for sites showing Bing ads then a) they'd lose all their Adwords customers to Bing as this became known and b) quality would be less relevant meaning their organic results get worse, not better.