Of course users ignore all the clutter around the edges of the web page. Years of exposure to add-supported commercial websites have trained this useful habit into us.
Fixing “user myopia” by adding more stuff and more highlight around the edges is not the answer. Time is short, attention is precious, and adding more clutter just makes users pay even less attention to all of it.
The only cure that I have found is that after I start to trust a site (e.g. Stackoverflow) I’m willing to come back and pay enough attention to learn its conventions, bells and whistles.