Pop Up Regulation

byEdwardtrave1

795 followers

9 years ago

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