Too Many Ads at the Top of The Page Will Hurt Your Google Rankings

We’ve been saying for years that cluttering up your landing pages with ads, especially at the top of the page hurts the user experience which reduces conversion rates.

Now it can hurt your organic rankings too.

At the Pubcon Internet marketing conference this past November Google announced it would be updating its algorithm to reorder search results, dropping positions for web pages that “load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. ”

Google has been rolling out that algorithm change since January. Here’s Google’s announcement called the Page layout algorithm improvement