Pixelrage.net

Some people are pretty bad at ad placement, or are clueless about where they belong on a site. I have seen some pretty bad examples of AdSense placement in my day, but this one really takes the cake:

Hahaha...no seriously. Wait...you're not kidding?! D:

Holy crap almighty…where do you even start? Just look at that headline, it’s being gang banged by two full AdSense banners and two link lists. It’s so horribly done that it’s comical, and I laughed the first time I saw the page load.

To follow up, there’s a horizontal AdSense link bar above this mess, and a 250×250 square on the upper right. That’s one, two, three, four, five, SIX AD PLACEMENTS on a single screen page that has no content beyond a headline and a “recent posts” feed!

Webmasters like this just embarrass the rest of the community. There’s a fine line between subtly using PPC banners, and this site took a big steaming crap on that line.

If you’re going to place ads, please don’t annoy your users. Use your brain, and know the right places to put ads (looking at an industry-standard heat map gives you the answer). Don’t force it down the user’s throat. If you plan not to follow that advice, at least make the ads blend with the rest of the page.

Placing ads to force accidental clicks is so 2004, just don’t do it. Google doesn’t like it, the visitors get angry, and the internet marketing community will usually chastise you for it, too – especially if they are paying AdWords customers and and fed up with flipping the bill for useless clicks every month.