Back in September 2016 I wrote about the looming interstitial penalty and how much I was looking forward to Google dropping it in January 2017.

What is in interstitial, you ask? An annoying pop up. In fact, I think this should be called the Google Pop Up Penalty. At least, that is what a client called it this morning on a call. The penalty is supposed to affect search results displayed to searchers using mobile devices. Here are some example interstitials:

Google Pop Up Penalty strikes January 2017

Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if someone had some before and after screenshots of the rankings drop? Yes, yes it would. Oh wait, I do! Unfortunately, all of the websites I was tracking removed their intrusive popups or adapted to them! There plenty of companies who did not, however. I will post examples here if and when I find them. But there are companies, such as PC Magazine, who were penalized, and affected pages dropped from page 1 to page 2.

What is the Google Pop Up Penalty?

Popups which appear on cell phones create a frustrating user experience. When this happens, sometimes Google has to step in and take steps to ensure people using their search engine are not getting a frustrating user experience when they click through to sites from their search engine. Google specifically mentions three main types of pop ups, as seen in the image above. In a nutshell, if people click through to your site expecting content and they are instead greeted with a popup which makes the content unreadable, you are eligible for a penalty.

The algorithm tweak rolled out January 10, 2017.

I will be covering this more on this blog in the near future.

 

Len
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On January 13, 2017   /   SEO News & Tips   /   2 Comments
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