Well the answer is simple, yes and it is in the process of penalizing more websites that exist, or Google believes exist, purely to push web adverts on their websites.

The head of Google's web spam team announced at the PubCon conference in Las Vegas on November 7th, 2011 that Google was testing improved algorithms that will determine how much of your content is available above the fold, before you have to scroll, on a web page to your web site visitors. Websites that have lots of ads that obscure the content of the page where warned they may see penalties applied to their website as a result.

So what classifies as an Ad heavy website and will your website be classed as one?

The way to determine if your website holds too many ads is to simply look at it. Are there simply too many ads before or around the content, are there ads that can be mistaken for your content, ads that can be mistaken for your own website links, ads to downloadable content that appears to download content from your website but takes the user to another website instead?

In fact just look to see if over half the top section of the page is taken up by ads, website header and navigation aids.

If the answer is yes to any, or a couple of the above, it will matter very little about the actual content on your website, the code marking it or any other factors as your website may be being penalized just for pushing too many ads.

Why has Google decided to penalise Ad heavy websites, possibly like mine?

Google is a website and like most websites Google, like you, has to keep the results it gives its website users relevant to what they are searching for otherwise they will go elsewhere. If a website is pushing too many ads and is ad heavy then it may be seen as not being relevant to what the user is searching for, regardless of the content on that web page, as it may be putting those users off because they are distracted by flashing and confusing ads over which parts of the page are actually part of the website the user wants to read and see.

So how do I resolve this if my website is too heavy on ads?

The answers are remarkably simple:

Reduce the number of ads on the page

Simply reduce the amount of ads on your web pages as this will show more of the page as less ads means there is more room for your websites content.

Put your ads at the bottom or middle of the page

Make sure quite a few of your ads are at the bottom or middle of your web page, not just in the code then position them at the top with styling, as that won't work due to the new Google algorithm changes. This will help to spread what ads you have on the page out more, meaning more content will be shown to your users, and will make your site more useable.

Reduce the size of the header

The header can take up a very large percentage of the top half of the page, if yours does look into to seeing if you can make your website header area smaller as this will help to bring more content up the page as well. Maybe even look into having a separate header design for your home page which is larger than the rest of your internal pages to your website, like we have done for some of our clients like Fosseway tapes, if you want to ideally keep a larger header on one of your pages.

This will also help to not only show less ads and show more content but to actually make your home page more unique at the same time.

Think about making the width of your web page wider

If you have a particular thin width website design look at making the width larger, this will mean more space to show your web sites content and percentage wise the amount of space the ads takes up will be a lot less than before.

Add more content

The page does actually have good content, and a good amount of it, on it right?
Because at the end of the day what is the point of making everything smaller to move the content up the page if you only have a couple of lines of indexable text?

If you are struggling with any of the above and think Ads may be causing your site negative results in the search engines, contact Specnet today and we can give you a free no obligation site health check and search engine prominence report and discuss your problems further.