Ads control with Placeholders

Diego

Hi Community, hope someone has a good suggestion to fix finally this...

All of my articles are receiving every day less traffic, and the biggest issue highlighted by Search Console is the Cumulative Layout Shift, which means my content moving while a visitor is reading the page.
I cannot even disagree with Google because it's something I hate when it happens to me, but how this may happen if any element of my pages if predefined and doesn't have legs?
The answer I gave myself is 1) because adv format may be different, page by page, even in the same placeholder's location, and 2) because ads take (much) longer than the content to load.

So, I decided to start from zero to fix the problem, and I switched off on Ezoic Ads ad Ezoic Humix sections anything having a button to be switched off. For Generated placeholders I even set them to appear in a page not even linked into the menu. Did it work? No. After cleaning Leap's cache and using the Incognito mode on my browsers, at least 1 adv still appears. Mostly at the very bottom of the page but also in the middle of an article.

Until it will appear, I won't be able to ask Search Console to fix the CSL issue. And I won't be able to add, via customized placeholders, exactly what and where to show.

How can I make a totally blank setup, but still able to show my customized placeholders?

Thank you!

HarryB

Hi Diego,

thanks for reaching out. so Ezoic won't be contributing to CLS as we have specific measures to counter it: Ad locations are determined before the initial page load, and ad space is reserved on the page for them to load into, rather than loading the ads and then expanding space on the page for them to load.

I'd also say that, although core web vitals are a factor in ranking, they're a really minimal consideration, as long as your site is usable it shouldn't cause issues from a search rankings perspective.

For this reason, I wouldn't recommend resetting your ad setup from scratch. Our system will need to reoptimize, which will lead to reduced revenue at a time when ad rates are starting to pick up. Your traffic, although I appreciate it's lower than this time last year, does appear to have been levelled out for a while.

One thing I did notice was that you're writing a lot of posts on legal advice which, while the content itself may be super informative, there's not much from what I can see on your site that states your credentials and authority to be providing this information. After Google's recent helpful content update, a top member of Google's search team said that a lot of sites were performing poorly because they don't have the authority to speak on the topic of their website.

Having an about page featuring info on you, your credentials, as well as sources to back this up, could go a long way to fix this and over time could really help increase the authority score on your site, and subsequently your traffic.

HarryB

A link to the article mentioning the comment from Google staff: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-helpful-content-update-staying-36102.html#:~:text=Google's%20John%20Mueller%20said%20it,2023%20Google%20helpful%20content%20update.