It’s been long said that Google will reward you for using their properties.
We wondered if Google’s AdSense will give you a ranking boost if you have it on the page.
Does it give you an advantage? We test that out.
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This one is pretty interesting. Test 377 is by Hunter. Does having Adsense on a site help with rankings?
The idea is you had Adsense, you put it on your website and then you allow the Adsense system to pull in related ads based on your keywords. And does having that in there help your rankings? I'll go ahead and skip to the results.
Adsense did not help at all! In fact, it stayed right down there at the bottom, which could be a couple things but primarily I'm thinking that 1) it's not a ranking factor and 2) it’s Adsense code and pretty much all Google codes slows down your website and so maybe you're looking at a page speed thing.
Ted says the page speed is not a ranking factor. I kind of I disagree with Ted, but I think it's a little bit harder to test that in the wild because there's so many factors that go into pagespeed minification, caching the CDN, all those things can trigger and then you have a situation where what is the part of page speed that actually matters.
And testing those in isolation is a little rough so we all agree to disagree with Ted there. But I'm thinking that this might be a page speed issue because there's more content on these now.
In theory, Adsense is giving the related relevant content so why wouldn't it at least be up - you know give it a little bit of a bump because there's more stuff on the pages versus the others, right? But that's my theory.
Also the page speed is affected when you add in these scripts. Google scripts are notoriously slow.
And then our own testing tools bastard their scripts when people put them on your site so go figure. So that could be an issue.