Pop Up Regulation
In October, Gary Illyes, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced that Google would be switching to a mobile first index in the near future. It was also announced that as of January 10th 2017, Google will be chastising mobile websites with intrusive interstitials that make it more difficult to access the desired content.
Interstitials are webpages that appear in-between a referenced page and the page that references it. For example, when you click on a website from Google’s search results page and an ad crop up before you’re able to access the viewing of that website.
Google is penalizing mobile sites with intrusive interstitials (aka intrusive pop ups) in an endeavor to improve the browsing use on mobile devices.
Here is an example.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=http://www.forbes.com/&refURL=&referrer=
Google has classified 3 types of pop-ups that are an imperative part of a website and will not be penalized.
- Pop-ups for legal obligations, such as age verification or agreeing to cookie use.
- Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable.
- Small banner pop-ups that use a reasonable amount of space, are easily dismissible and don’t interfere with users interacting with your website.
Thanks,
Ed
Recent Comments
9
Nice! I've never liked those annoying in your face popups. I just hit back button when a site does that to me. Give 'em a "bounce" for that :)
Yeah, those things made me mad sometimes. They would follow you down the page! It's like. Get out of my face! I leave didn't even bother after that.