Do sites without ads perform better in Google search results?

Question

Does Google view sites without advertising as a more reliable source of information and increase the odds of a website returning in the search results?

I ask this for a few reasons.

The main reason is page load speed. My production site loads in around 6-7 seconds due to there being 3 AdSense ads on the page. My dev site, which is on the same server and is an exact clone of the main site (they share the same DB) loads in under 2 seconds and has no adverts. If I remove adverts from my main site the page load speed will drop considerably. Does Google already consider this and ignore ads?

A lot of sites are clearly money sites that are just jam packed with ads with the intention of making money. If a site has no adverts then it's most likely a site that is serving a purpose outside of making a quick dollar from someone visiting the page. Does Google see this as a pro?

Removing ads will also allow me to move the entire site to HTTPS, which will be another boost since AdSense breaks the padlock. I just want to be sure it's worth the loss of income as adsense pays my server costs.

Answer 1

Google will penalize pages with an excessive number of ads but you can have up to three ad blocks with no penalty (based on AdSense policy). As for page load it does effect pagerank but not a ridiculously huge amount compared to how content affects it.

Update 4 March 2018: I should probably add to this that ad providers such as Google AdSense generally load ads asynchronously over AJAX, through the use of frames, or through a combination of methods in order to load the content separately to the loading of the page content. With this loading method following best practices the impact on SEO of having ads on the page becomes even less as the time to first byte and the above the fold content loading is even faster. Additionally Google's indexing systems have become a lot more advanced over the last few years and are able to identify the difference between substantial content on a page and ads on a page.