Close on the heels of Google’s Freshness Update, came the news that the search engine major will be soon targeting websites that are ad heavy.  This was announced by the head of Google’s web spam and quality control team, Matt Cutts, at PubCon in Vegas in early November 2011. Google ultimately aims to remove such sites from its search results altogether. Ad-heavy pages are those where it is tough to find the real content because of too many advertisements. At the conference Cutts said that the search engine was in the process of testing more algorithm updates to ascertain the amount of content available on web pages. Websites that have too many ads that make it difficult for visitors to find content will be facing the ax from Google. The warning implies that Google is dead serious about winnowing out such pages from its search results and this effort is essentially an extension of the search engine’s Panda or ‘Farmer’ update that had targeted low quality web pages on ‘content farms’. Is your site at risk for such a penalty? Cut to the chase and just ask whether your site visitors can easily view content on your web pages or if there are annoying or distracting elements on them. If your answer is the former, and it’s tough finding the real content on your website’s pages, you must take immediate steps to redesign your site. Remove third-party ads and make it it easier for your site visitors to find content on your pages. Hire the services of an internet marketing agency to help improve backlinks and use only ethical white hat SEO methods to optimize your web pages.

Tags: 2011, ad heavy, advertisement, algorithm, backlinks, content, ethical, Farmer Update, Freshness Update, Google, Matt Cutts, optimize, Panda Update, penalty, PubCon, search engine, search results, SEO, spam, third party ads, Vegas, web, web page, website, white hat

This entry was posted on Friday, November 4th, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under SEO.