Aggressive Ad Placement + Generic Bad Content Kills Sites
I made a post a few weeks ago on Seobook about how my main site was receiving basically no traffic from Google, even though I had a forum that was active and a content site that was full of useful content. Yahoo was sending me 500+ referrals a day and Google was sending me less than 20. Aaron replied, which I did appreciate greatly, but I have to disagree with his assessment of the ads killing my site. The ads had nothing to do with my bad Google referrals. Over a year ago I was running Digital Point Co Op and selling text links on my site. I made a mistake by listing on my site advertising page that I was selling site wide links. Google picked up on this whether it be manually or with their algorithm and penalized my site. Matt Cutts commented on my post and gave me a run down of what he saw on his side of things. Two days later my Google rankings returned and my traffic shot through the roof. My earnings are up and registrations are up.
I had a friend point out that Aaron made a new post using my site as an example of sites that were being overly aggressive with ad placement and it was killing them in the process. I’m going to have to disagree with him to an extent. Having those ads under my navigation has not prevented me from landing on Digg.com, Autoblog.com and Jalopnik to name a few. In the past week I have been covered 2 times by Autoblog on news items I have written. If you have good content that people want to link to then the majority won’t care about two ads above the fold. As each year passes people are upgrading their monitors to support higher resolutions which will allow them to view more of the page without scrolling. I use 1920×1200 and have no problem seeing the content on my site (Example). While I understand there is still a large amount of people on 1024×768 and even 800×600 the trend is not moving towards more people using these resolutions.
Here is a screen shot of my current Google referrals for a day:
and my uniques for the month:
This month is my best month since I started the site in 2003 for revenue and traffic.
I don’t have any problem with him using my site in his video. It’s his opinion and he is generally right with the assumption that over zealous ads can kill sites. If you have the content to back up the ads then the impact the ads will have on your traffic are minimal. That’s at least what my experience has found running my web sites.
November 30th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I’ve got an obnoxious 336×280 adsense top-center on every page (except the homepage) and get well over 200 new members a day. I also mention under most ads that registering will get rid of most of those ads.
November 30th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I have 2 336×280 ads above the fold and get more members per day now than i did when i was running a single 728×80 ad there.
My user’s LIKE my ads, but it gives them suggestions/ideas for places to buy the parts they are looking for to complete/fix their modifications to their vehicles.
It’s the same reason why I don’t disable them for admin. I like to look at them to see what’s out there in the market too. Too bad I can’t click on them :D
November 30th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
It is also worth noting that you left out “prior shady link deals” when describing the state of your site in the comment on my site. Mentioning stuff like Digital Point coop would also have been relevant, instead of stating “I’ve filed for a reconsideration but honestly have no idea what to tell them. I don’t use spam techniques and all the content is on target. ”
And you might do ok as is, but others in the same market are getting about 10x the traffic per Compete.com, and that was even with all your viral marketing success so it seems there is still room for improvement. Hopefully the Google fix helps you close the gap a bit, but you can’t be certain on what links you are missing out on due to your ad placement because it is a hidden cost. You might be getting 5 or 10 good links when a story goes viral when you could be getting 20 or 30, etc.
November 30th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Hi Aaron,
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. In the reconsideration request I mentioned that I was not selling links anymore and I was not using Digital Point Co Op. I did this a couple of times over the year that I stopped doing both. Nothing improved on my site even though I was legitimate so I was getting discouraged and didn’t know what else I could do to get this fixed. It seems no matter what I tried nothing worked with Google.
I agree that I have a ways to go to compete with the large sites. It’s hard to compete in SERPs with a site that has my targeted keyword in their URL (MustangForums) and has been bought out by Internet Brands on top of that. After this month I will be interested to see how I compare with them on Compete considering how well I have done this month.
I don’t believe I am missing out on that many links because of the ads. I guess I’ll just have to disagree with you on that. Thanks for the feedback you’ve given me and I apologize if I wasn’t as clear as I should have been.