Ad Placement Techniques - Avoid Some Disgusting Ones

Ads are the latest and no doubt one of the effective mediums for publicizing and promoting business. Google also knows this and hence provides its own service, Adwords. Ads placement on your website is the major part which is to be considered because not all strategies are pleasing. Google considers some advertising techniques annoying or spammy and generally penalizes those sites that employ them. Hence It's important to know which types of advertising techniques are acceptable and recommended by Top 10 SEO Firms, and which ones can lead you to pay a lot.

So here are some of the techniques which you should avoid :

1.Flood of ads when the page loads : A viewer automatically visits a webpage for the content, and he expects content to be the first thing to see. If there is nothing but advertisements load first, with the actual content hidden somewhere deep below it, then the page is not attractive and will lead user to be a little disgusted. Google takes this into notice when deciding rankings of websites pages. With flood of advertisements above the fold, sites are penalized. You can always use one banner ad.

2.Overlay ads : These ads are those annoying ones which you mostly see when the website is loaded and it pops up on the middle of the screen hiding the original content on the screen. They will not disappear till you yourself click on the close button. Users are many and some of them are impatient also. So because these overlay ads block the visitor from seeing any of the content on the page, these impatient viewers who are in a hurry do not locate the close button also and just hit the back button.

This increases the site's bounce rate which means the number of visitors who, upon coming to the page, immediately leave it. Google measures a high bounce rate as an indication of a poor site, and hence it will give that site a lower ranking.

3.Interstitials : These ads go beyond overlay ads and are forms of full-page advertising. They redirect visitors to another page ad at a different URL, along with a button for the user to continue to their destination. Interstitials or roadblocks are even more responsible to contribute to a high bounce rate than full-screen floating or overlay ads. When users see that they're getting redirected to a different URL, most of them assume they have clicked on some spammy site and immediately hit the back button.

Users mostly do this before the page even finishes loading and without looking for any “continue” button.

4.Audio Or video Ads : Auto-playing ads with audio are something very disruptive. These ads with the sudden burst of noise, shock the visitors and then they hastily try to pause or mute the ad. If they are not able to find the stop button quickly or if there is no way to mute the sound, they'll close the window immediately. Multiple auto-playing ads are more detrimental, which result in overlapping audio.

The worst-case occurs because of this sudden speaking ads when a visitor is in a public place such as a library where the sudden sound causes a distraction or draws attention. The website visitor, will feel angry and will be annoyed with your such a foolish placement of ads. These signs and behaviour of the visitors will no longer prove out to be fruitful to you .

It is not like that you cannot place any video or audio add on your website. If you want to feature any audio or video ads on your site then make sure that they play only when they are clicked. 

5.Ads masked as content : Attracting more traffic to pay-per-click ads, many sites adopt the strategy to disguise the ads as content. Mostly what these site owners do is include a section at the bottom of an article, which appears to be a series of links to articles on similar topics, or a navigation toolbar that doesn’t really take you anywhere .

These links are actually advertisements. Any method that seeks to misguide users is against Google’s guidelines, and can result in a site being penalized or permanently removed.

6. Ad content ad content ad - this is not acceptable : Different site owners have different strategies to publish ads, some of them try to increase the influence of their ads by placing them near the main content rather than on the side or bottom. In the case of numerous advertisements, this forms a pattern like this :ad, content, ad, content, ad, and so on. Google's quality guidelines specifically call this pattern as a poor site structure as it is inhibiting user to go through the content in a flow. If you are thinking of this technique then, it is the best to limit it to only one per page. 

7.Limited pages : Some website owners have proved out to be so intelligent that they have found out more techniques to annoy their visitors. After realizing that too much stuffing of ads on a single page can be very eerie so they came up with an incredible solution and i.e. split the content into small parts and spread it across multiple pages, each of which can have its own advertisements. This technique sounds good but results in an article that is displayed in tiny chunks, which are easily lost somewhere in the waves of advertisements.

This type of ad structure also seems out to be frustrating and Google again does not accept it because now Google will have to crawl  30 different pages instead of 2 or 3 pages with rich quality content. With rare content Google will not consider it worthy of a high search-result ranking. 

So If you're going to implement pagination, keep it to two or three pages only and ensure each page is enriched with quality content with information and in depth knowledge.

What types of advertisements you or best seo companies place on the site and where they place them, affects massively the ranking of your site in Google's search results or any other search engine. Excessive advertisements placed above the fold or multiple advertisements that divide the main content of a page are not at all acceptable in the long run and can result in penalization. Invasive ads, or those that block users’ ability to see the content or which display auto-playing audio, will definitely hamper your ranking.

Relying on advertising for revenue is good but to avoid any penalties, beware of Google's quality guidelines and the massive impact your ad placement can have on users.