Did Monetising Your Website Turn it Into Low Quality Junk?

I normally don’t talk too much about visual design.    My experience has mostly been that whether a site looks “good” or not has little to do with the next steps it should take to be more successful.  There are, however, several aspects of visual presentation, particularly presentation of content, that can be crucial. 

This post is about one issue where the purely visual presentation of your site becomes a game changer for your SEO and your conversion.  There is an imaginary line where your site goes from being not particularly visually appealing to creating a strong negative impression.

The other day I came across a link on Twitter to a blog post.  The title in the tweet looked interesting so I went to take a look. 

The problem was the content column was full of Google Adsense ads.  I was three or four lines into the article and what I was reading stopped.  Interrupted by a block of Ads from Google.  I got another paragraph or so and then it happened again. 

People Don’t Link to Low Quality Junk

Monetising your blog can be important but be careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.   That post was interesting.  The first paragraph or so was promising.  Now, I can’t even remember what it was about.  It was presented so badly that I couldn’t read it.  More importantly.  The effect of shoving that many ads at me in that prominence with such poor, stand-out formatting was that the page looked like low quality junk.  It gave me such a negative impression that I could not link to it or share it on Twitter.  The last thing I want is for people to click through and think “He just sent me to a load of low quality junk”.

So there you go.  You came up with good content on an unique and interesting topic.  The kind of thing I love to share.  I would have shared it on Social Media and maybe talked about it and linked to it in a blog post.  You did all the hard stuff well.  Then you threw great lumps of ads into the middle of your content in a way that was both disruptive to your message and visually unappealing.  Not everyone will react the way I did but there will be many. 

The result:  You lose links and social media mentions that the post would have gained, harming your SEO.   You lose conversions because the impression of low quality junk is hardly going to inspire visitors to see what you have to offer.

As it happens, I wasn’t looking at the ads either.  I probably wouldn’t have been looking at the ads anyway but if you’d engaged me and kept me around to look at a few more pages or come back, who knows?

From my perspective as a visitor, wowing me with your web-design is usually a waste of effort.  But you should take a look at the pages of your site and consider whether the impression it gives fits with your goals and the goals you have for your content.  And be careful when monetising your website or blog.  Those ads are a necessary evil but if you take it too far you’ll start to see negative reactions.  As with everything.  Test, test, test.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Conversion, Link Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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