For all those sites that have pop-ups that Google considers intrusive, please listen to this.
Effective Jan. 1, 2017, Google will punish sites that have intrusive popups or interstitials on mobile devices. According to Google, this is an effort to improve the mobile search experience.
Google says that “Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”
Here are some examples of techniques that make content less accessible to a user:
- Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
- Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
- Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.
By contrast, here are some examples of techniques that, used responsibly, would not be affected by the new signal:
- Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
- Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
- Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.
I use a pop-up. How can I fix this?
Apart from the fact that you have till the end of the year to figure out what to do, here are some of the things you could do:
- Turn off the pop-ups for mobile devices. This can be easily done by changing the settings.
- Make your pop-ups smarter. Target people exiting instead of coming onto your site. If you are using Mailmunch like we do at Innovation Village, you can trigger pop-ups based on:
- Time on page or site
- Number of pageviews
- Past behavior
- Click to trigger
- Use Embed forms for mobile devices
