I heard that if you put an adsense ad in your article near the top or in the middle it can effect your search result ranking. Is there any truth to this? Why did they change it? I only have two ads on my site and they are both adsense ads. Doesn't google own adsense so why would it lower your search rank if the ad is in the article? the person I asked about this told me that it makes the site misleading and gives a bad user experience when the ad is distracting the content is this true?
Vel, there's an article on Google Webmaster blog, where it says that it can have an impact on sites that push content way down with large blocks of ads. The article is from 2012, so I don't know how valid the info still is: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html So the person who suggested this was probably right.
What you are after the info on can be found here https://support.google.com/adsense/...7438#Difficult_to_distinguish_ads_and_content Yes you are right that if your site is "Top heavy" with ads then they will hammer you down in the rankings, this happened to one of my sites with 1,500 unique visitors a day, which dropped to 200 after the ad update on google.
I have always tried to strike a balance between having an ad "in content" and above the fold, and still have content above the fold. But I wish I knew exactly how much content is necessary. If you have a site header, random stuff in a side bar, an image that is at the top of an article and also have an ad near the top of the article, it is certainly easy to have almost no textual content above the fold. I've just acquired a new site that Google really likes. I believe this because the traffic for this site seems to go up every time there is a Panda update. I don't want to hurt the ranking of the site but I also need to monetize it in an aggressive way. This topic is really important to me, how many ads can I get away with up high without hurting rankings. I would appreciate feedback anyone has to offer.