Google Says Large Lead Generator Forms Or CTAs Can Sometimes Be Seen As Ads

Google’s John Mueller said that sometimes Google can treat a large lead generation form or call-to-action as an ad if the content on the page is not on the same topic as what is in the lead gen form or CTA. And when that happens, Google may say there is an ad pushing down the primary content of the page and thus it may be impacted by the old page layout algorithm.

John said this when asked about it a the 11:00 mark into this past Friday’s video. Here is the embed:

Here was the question from Alistair Knight:

I was just wondering and I think you’ve spoken about this before recently that you know the content, the main content should be sort of above the fold. Would this like lead generation form impact SEO in any way? Because if we scroll down, it’s an article about the ultimate guide to phone system prices and at the top here there’s just a sort of lead generator form where people can compare telephone system prices. Would that impact SEO?

Here is John’s answer:

I don’t know. My guess is probably not noticeably. What effect might come into play is our algorithms do look for things like ads above the fold that kind of push the main content down below the fold. And it’s possible that we would think a lead gen form like that would be kind of like an ad. But I don’t think it would always be the case. And it kind of also depends on what that page is trying to rank for. If it’s essentially a page that’s trying to rank for it’s like, I don’t know, get car insurance and the form is about like sign up for car insurance then like that’s kind of the intent of the page. But if the intent of the page is like find out more about why oranges grow and then you have car insurance for them on top, then that seems more like an ad.

Here is how Glenn Gabe summed it up on Twitter:

E.g. if a page is about finding car insurance & the CTA is for signing up for car insurance, then that makes more sense. But if the page is about learning X topic, but there are CTAs for finding car insurance at the top, then that can be seen as an ad: https://t.co/Fj0yJjJy2d pic.twitter.com/naD6bXAT01

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 12, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.