Stop cluttering your content with Ads – People and Search Engines don’t like it

Over recent years, bloggers have increasingly tried to monetize their site by showing pay per click ad campaigns or affiliate links. If you search the Internet, you will see that a lot of people are claiming that they earned substantial amounts by displaying pay per click or affiliate ads on their sites.

While for some people this really is working, it is not the best idea for everyone. If your site has little traffic to begin with, you don’t want to scare potential customers by pushing ads at them immediately. How do you feel when you get to a new website that you’ve never been to before, and you see lots of ads and little content? With some websites, you will notice that the ads are everywhere; header, sidebar, footer and even in amongst the content. This can make it hard for visitors to see the information they really care about.

Additionally, this will not help in your SEO efforts because you are passing your page ranking juice to these sites.

If your blog’s main purpose is to make money from ads, then of course you’re going to want to show the ads. Also, if there is a product or company that you think your readers would be interested in, then by all means link to it. However, here is some useful information to bear in mind when placing any type of ad on your site.

• Only include ads that are related to your content. For example, suppose you write an article about cars, the advertisements for car services, buying and selling of cars and car accessories would be useful to your readers. However, if you include an ad for herbal medicines, this will not only look out of place on your site, but your readers are unlikely to click on it. If you have advertisements that are related to your content, there is a greater chance that your website visitors will click on these ads resulting in profit for you.
• Ads that are in the form of images or flash objects will affect the loading speed of your web pages, and this will hurt your SEO rankings. As much as possible choose ads that are text only or are small images.
• Continually check on your advertisements links because over time the links maybe broken. This often happens with images. You will notice that it’s broken because the image will not load or when you click the link the page cannot be found. When you encounter this problem it is best to replace the advertisement. If you install the “broken links checker” plugin in WordPress, you can easily detect broken links.
• If you can edit the advertisement HTML code, make sure to place a “nofollow” tag. Just insert rel=”nofollow”. In this way, you page rank juice will not be passed on these advertisements.

Example: Affiliate Link without NoFollow Tag

Example: Affiliate Link with NoFollow Tag