AdSense Ads Above the Fold and Google Rankings

Comment on WordPress SEO Theme Developer by SEO Dave.

If Google do take AdSense code placement into account with an aim to downgrading sites with AdSense code above the fold the good news is the Stallion code is designed to push the content high in the code and as much of the repeated template stuff low code wise.

The AdSense content ad that floats to the left/right of the main text is located above the main text, so is the only AdSense content ad unit that’s above the fold code wise.

Sidebar AdSense content ads though shown above the fold in most setups is code wise near the bottom.

Above Footer AdSense ad unit is above the footer area.

The Stallion setup code wise is:

Some header code
Main content
Extra content (comments, related posts plugins…)
Sidebars: left, right, 5 footer widget areas
Footer area
Some more header code

The only AdSense content ad unit that’s above the fold code wise is the main one.

This assumes of course Google can’t ‘see’ a page like we can: unlikely they know where a sidebar is layout wise relative to actual code.

If you disable the main AdSense ad unit and have two widget ad units you can add one of them to the header widget area (the 486px wide one works well) which will put the Adsense ad within the header at the top (way above the fold). Code wise this code is about as low as it can get, it’s below the footer code.

Always remember there’s a big difference when using Stallion with what you see above the fold in a browser and what’s above the fold code wise. If you wanted to see what Google sees (assuming they don’t understand CSS too well) try deleting the two CSS files a site is currently using, this will load the site basically like Google sees it.

David