Google penalizing mobile sites with intrusive pop-ups

Google is always focusing its updates and ranking factors around user experiences with the search engine and the websites it links the users to; so, it should come as no surprise that the user experience is at the core of its latest penalty.

Starting January 10, mobile sites with intrusive pop-ups or interstitials will be penalized in their ranking. Why the penalty? According to Google, “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… This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result.”

Chances are you’ve seen this or have it enabled on your site where you go to a website and a pop-up or overlay takes over the page:

Photo credit: Google Webmaster blog

Now, Google isn’t flat out penalizing all mobile pages for this as long as the pop-ups are reasonable and easily dismissible or used for legal purposes such as age verification. It’s important to remember that this is just one signal of hundreds and that highly relevant and well-written content can still get your page to rank highly, it’s just something to be mindful of when implementing these pop-ups and keeping your guests’ best interest in mind.

Photo credit: Google Webmaster blog

Another major change for Google concerning mobile was its announcement of a separate mobile search index. You can read more about that here.