How Ads Can Screw Up Your SEO: Bloomberg.com Example

I love Bloomberg.com, it is possibly my favourite financial news website. Being the lazy person that I so often am though, I do sometimes use Google to navigate to the website, even though I am quite aware of how the address bar in the browser works. Today I spotted a strange sitelinks (sitelinks are the links to internal pages that Google sometimes shows on the search engine results page). There was one for “SKIP AD

Here’s the proof:

Bloombergs Skip Ad Sitelink

However, we can learn something from this too. It has for years generally been considered bad practice to show full page adverts on your homepage, however, this does not appear to be the case, at least for Bloomberg. They still have a vast number of pages well listed in the search engines, and also a very relevant set of sitelinks and a search box below – something most webmasters aspire to!

So, are splash pages OK now? Can we use them without fear of penalty, so long as we provide an easy way to “SKIP AD”?

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