Last year Google announced a new criteria within their website ranking. Every online business needs to adhere to these new rules in order to stay in tune with the new regulations. This announcement is regarding the use of intrusive interstitials. Google wants your web pages more user friendly. As mobile devices are driving the major proportion of site traffic and it’s essential to give them a trouble free experience whilst navigating your website.
The idea behind posing this penalty is that these intrusive popups often block content behind them and they are annoying to the users of your website. Many websites are using popups and when visitors try to read some information on pages, a frustrating pop up appears in front of their eyes and it hides everything behind it.
In order to improve your visiting experience of consumers or buyers, Google made an announcement to improve mobile search methodology by posing a penalty over popups. It became in force from 10th January 2017 and was communicated via Googles announcement, pages. Any website that does not provide access to content will be penalized and may not rank as highly in the future.
What do you need to do next to your website?
The announcement was for Mobile search but not for the desktop users. You may find it interesting to know that WordPress offers several advanced plugins that can be customized. These create a popup when a user is accessing a page from their desktop machine. However, they can be automatically closed for mobile users which, preferable for mobile users.
The change is not for all pop-ups and interstitials, just intrusive ones.
Google’s list of conditions shows when the change may not affect sites that use interstitials:
- The change does not impact desktop searches, only mobiles.• The change does not impact desktop searches, only mobiles.
- Pages can still rank if they have “great, relevant content.”
- “Okay” interstitials include cookie usage agreements and age verification pop-ups
- “Reasonably sized banners” that are “easily dismissible” are also okay.
we feel that they just annoy users and if you are disabling them for your mobile experience you may as well cut them off from desktop also. We believe it is only a matter of time before Google will implement this rule for desktop users anyway. There are so many other ways to create engaging content without the use of annoying popups.
You also need to make sure your website is mobile friendly you can check this using Googles mobile checker here
Do you need pop up on your website if you do make sure you only enable them for desktops and not mobiles
To read the full details of the Google article you can read it here
