I am new to trying to become search engine optimized. Maybe this is a stupid question, but does having ads on one's website help or hurt in the eyes of Google or other search engines? I have a few ads on my website, small ones, and just wondered if that turns the spiders off at all, or if it might be a good thing. Any thoughts?

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Liane Jamason, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty
Tampa FL Homes|Free List of Tampa Short Sales & Foreclosures|TampaRealEstateGeek.com

Liane Jamason is a Realtor in Tampa Bay servicing St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Tampa, Carollwood, Westchase, Ybor City, South Tampa, Davis Island, Brandon, Riverview, Apollo Beach, Ruskin and beyond!

I don't know about the SEO part of it but when I get a prospect on my site I do not want to give them a link to somebody else's site.

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I don't have much experience with them on my site as well, mostly because of what Bigtoe said. Unfortunately it becomes very tedious to control the ads that appear on your site, and because your pages with ads "should be" mostly optimized for real estate, chances are is that your going to get another agent name in that ad.

What's the main purpose you seek with ads; to drive revenue to support your site or to get the site search engine friendly and optimized?

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Steve Castaneda, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty
The MyHomeHouston Team

Specializing in Houston Real Estate. Feel free to visit my Houston Real Estate Blog or read about Real Estate Technology for agents.

It would not drive traffic to any other real estate sites. The reason I ask is because I've found a new program that allows me to choose what company's ads I display on my site, and if someone does click through to them and buy something, I get a percentage of what they spend - and it works. I set it up awhile ago and had just one ad on my site and the other day I got a check in the mail and thought to myself, "SWEET!"

Many websites do this to help defray the cost of running the site. I am not that worried about people who are house shopping leaving to go buy ink for their printer, as it pops up a brand new window if they do happen to click on an ad, so eventually I would hope they'd be back on my site anyway if they are serious about home shopping. I just wondered if it would hurt me in any way for search engine optimization...

If you want to see what I mean, go to my website and look to the right hand side of the page under Sponsors.

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Liane Jamason, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty
Tampa FL Homes|Free List of Tampa Short Sales & Foreclosures|TampaRealEstateGeek.com

Liane Jamason is a Realtor in Tampa Bay servicing St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Tampa, Carollwood, Westchase, Ybor City, South Tampa, Davis Island, Brandon, Riverview, Apollo Beach, Ruskin and beyond!

Hola Liane,

I think to have ads in your site would not hurt you or your business. I belive your are giving your clients and visitors to your site something extra and at the same time you are getting pay by doing it

I sell real estate in Puerto Vallarta, mexico
I also have a new site where I offer real estate for sale and classifieds ads.

Juan Carrasco

From an SEO standpoint, ads do not have any impact on your websites performance in the search engine results.

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Lydia Taylor, Realtor & Broker

Augusta GA Real Estate | North Augusta SC Real Estate | Augusta GA Home Search

Maybe - it would depend on the kind of ad - for instance if it was a direct link (Lacking a no follow) then it would drain some pagerank that otherwise would be distributed to internal pages.

Also - Although your website is not purely for affiliate marketing, "sometimes" Google and others can get confused and lump your site in with affiliate websites which typically have dup content and provide no unique user experience.

For the amount of potential revenue you could generate at your traffic volume, it is not even worth the time, and it can cause you to appear less professional JMHO

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

if they're served in java script e.g. adsense et al, the spiders would just ignore them.
Google says their spider sees a webpage similarly to the lynx web browser, you should have a look at that to get an idea.

I don't think it is worth it compared to how much commission our sites can generate. All my energy is focused on the site's performance for capturing leads and converting them to sales. What if the ads distract and take away one customer who would have bought an expensive home from you?

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Jim Olenbush, ABR, CRS, GRI
Broker / Realtor

Austin Real Estate

Based on the size of the ads on my site, do you really think that would be the case? I don't.

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Liane Jamason, Realtor
Keller Williams Realty
Tampa FL Homes|Free List of Tampa Short Sales & Foreclosures|TampaRealEstateGeek.com

Liane Jamason is a Realtor in Tampa Bay servicing St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Tampa, Carollwood, Westchase, Ybor City, South Tampa, Davis Island, Brandon, Riverview, Apollo Beach, Ruskin and beyond!