Google Pop Up Penalty

Google to penalize intrusive mobile interstitials

Google’s intrusive interstitials penalty has officially commenced from January 10th 2017. The intrusive interstitials penalty is a step to eliminate pages that provide a poor experience to mobile users where content is immediately accessible yet blocked by a “pop-up”.

January 10, 2017 update: Starting today, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high. – Google Webmaster Central Blog

What are Interstitials?

Interstitials are advertisements that appear while a chosen website or page is downloading.
Techniques that make content less accessible to a user may trigger the Google Intrusive Interstitials penalty (a.k.a Google pop up penalty):

I suspect Google is targeting overlays that gray out the content beneath them to prevent you from reading a website. Mobile ads that are displayed over top of the main content appear to be no longer acceptable. This includes ads that appear when you land on a page, as well as ads that appear as you scroll down a page.

Examples of techniques that, when used responsibly, should not be affected by the new change:

This change only impacts mobile – You don’t have to remove intrusive pop-up ads and interstitials altogether, you only need to remove them on mobile pages. They can still be displayed on desktop browsers without incurring any kind of penalty.

Keep interstitials small – Google recommends using interstitials on mobile pages that only take up a “reasonable” amount of screen space.

Consider what being “Mobile-Friendly” means – Google will no longer consider pages with intrusive interstitials as being mobile-friendly. Google Penalizing Non Mobile Sites

Remove barriers for mobile users – Content on the pages you have indexed in mobile search must be readily available when a user clicks through to the page from Google. Ideally, there should be no barrier preventing a user from reading content on the page at any time.

Re-evaluate the use of Pop-Ups – businesses that rely on advertiser dollars, should figure out ways to make money without totally disrupting the mobile user experience.

Author: brad forster