Can ad location cause rankings penalties?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

In looking to offset a small loss in revenue from the recent algo change some ad placement changes have accomplished that on my site but... will this cause me ranking problems with Google search ?

Changes include

- moving a 160x600 ad from the bottom of the sidebar to the top.
- moving a 326x250 ad block from the bottom of articles to the top.

The end result is that there is a whole lot of ad taking up the top of the page. It looks more spammy but the content is otherwise unchanged. Is that a bad idea in terms of serp rankings ? Would a human spam team member write the page off as MFA ?

[ken_b]

It looks more spammy, because it is :) Actually, from your description, it probably looks more like an MFA, which may pay well in the short term, but.....

SO....

I'd guess that if a G staff reviewed a site it would be harder for any site to pass a hand check with that page layout.

That said ...

If you have high quality content that takes up more space on the page than the ads do, I doubt it would cause a problem.

Suggestion....

Move that 300x250 down a paragraph (6-8 lines) or so, so that your visitors get a chance to actually see some content at the top of the page.

>> SERP Rankings... No affect.

But that's just my opinion.