Google New Rule Decided To Punish Mobile Sites That Use Pop-up Ads

Google has decided to punish mobile sites that use disturbing pop-up ads by ranking them low and not figuring them apparently on search results. The move is an effort to make search easier for users. On the other hand, it is likely to affect the business like e-commerce ventures and news websites that heavily depend on such pop-up ads.

In its blog post to webmasters, Google said, “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.”

They further added:

“To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

Pop-ups that examine for users’ age notify users about the site’s cookies policy and appeal users to log in to their account, along with small banner ads, won’t be penalized. Google has published a photo on its blog presenting the three kinds of ads that will be covered by the new policy.

Google strictly wants developers to end this exercise of continuing with pop-up ads covering paramount content on the site. Website developers should stop the using Pop-up Ads to stay on the top of search results.

The change will come into effect on 10th January next year. Furthermore, this new rule will be valid especially to mobile only. These pop-up ads are usually problematic on smaller screens, and that is the reason why it is applied to mobiles.

But, all pop-ups under the sun will not be blocked. The blocked ones require meeting a certain degree of frustration according to Google. For example, necessary pop-ups like verifying age are permissible along with smaller banner ads at the top of a screen that do not block content. In Google’s rough formula, a “reasonable amount of screen space” is okay for these ads.

Now, Google is expecting to recover the mobile interface even more by punishing sites that block the content of their page with irritating popup ads.

These “intrusive interstitials,” Google says, make for a poor user experience compared to the one offered by pages without these popups and “where content is immediately accessible.”

“While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial,” writes Doantam Phan, a Google product manager. “This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result.”

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Google also declared that it will be eliminating the mobile-friendly label from its search results as it has found that around 85 percent of the websites in its search results now meet the norms since their introduction in 2014. The mobile-friendly label was basically given to a website that was optimized for mobile devices, for example, where the content and text was readable without zooming and the tap targets are suitably spaced. It added that even though the label is being removed to make search results “uncluttered,” the criteria will still continue to be a ranking signal.

However, a report by TechCrunch clarifies that Google will not punish all sites that use interstitials, but only the ones that make content less accessible.