Pages heavy with ads might get penalized

[maneetpuri]

Hello Friends,

If you see a drop in traffic on your site and your website is heavy on the ads, chances are you have been hit by changes in “Page Layout” algorithm by Google. Lately, Google has announced that it will penalize sites which are heavy loaded with ads above the fold. Google has posted on its blog that this updation is a reaction to users' complaints of lack of content on the sites. So, if your site don't have much quality content “above-the-fold”, you might get affected by this change.

Here is the full information:
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

Cheers,

[Discovery]

At first glance this may sound like a pretty vague rule, however lets put "heavy" into context.

If you think of Arbitrage pages, or as I call them garbitrage, the website will usually have a banner at the top, then the 4 text ads top center before the body content and usually ads running down the left or right column. The page may have only a couple paragraphs of content. For the worst offenders, the content is scraped from other sites.

This kind of ad loading is what Google is going after. So if you have a couple ads appropriately placed above the fold, a nice 3+ paragraphs of content and then a few ads down near the bottom of your page you should be doing just fine.

Again, increase content, decrease the number of locations you place ads to 3 or less. If you happen to have a few pages that have little content, reduce or remove the ads altogether.

We have seen a significant bump UP in our adsense revenue since these changes were implemented.

[AussieWebmaster]

the interesting part of the google article was the title about additions to the filter - it has been in place for a while