We’ve all been there. We use Google search on our mobile device to find some information, click on a site form the search results, and bam, you get a pop-up ad or an annoying interstitial that actually prevents you from reading the actual information that you need from that website. So you either just look for another site or get so annoyed that you just go back to scrolling through your Facebook feed. But now Google says sites that have these intrusive kinds of ads will be penalized by ranking them lower on the search results.
Google uses a variety of signals to determine search result rankings both for web and mobile, so if you own a site that uses these pop-up ads or interstitials, don’t panic just yet. But the search giant is giving you fair warning ahead of time that they are changing the algorithm (as they always do) by January 10, 2017 and that those sites “where content is not easily accessible to a user” will not be ranked as highly. It matters for sites that invest a lot in increasing their search rankings and who are competing with a lot of other sites for similar information.
This doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of all your ads on your site, since of course you probably get your revenue from them. Google has given some examples of interstitials that if used responsibly, should not be affected by the new signal that Google will be introducing. This includes legal obligation interstitials, login dialogs for private content and the likes, and banners that use a “reasonable amount of space” and that users can actually easily dismiss.
Users may be happy about this, but publishers will probably not be. But since almost all websites rely on search rankings from Google, then they will have no choice but to adjust to this new signal from them.
SOURCE: Google
Kind of like the giant best buy add that took over my screen just now when viewing this article? Good luck with that penalty 😉
I love how those intrusive popups pop up on this site 🙂