Google To Penalize Mobile Websites With Hard-To-Dismiss Popups

Google is trying to make the web better for everyone, or at least that’s their credo, and with mobile being one of the more popular ways of accessing websites on the move these days, Google has started to shift its focus onto mobile search and mobile websites. More recently they are looking into penalizing websites with annoying popups.

Have you ever been to a mobile website that has some kind of popup ad or message that makes it incredibly hard to load the content itself or to close? Yup, that’s kind of what Google’s annoyed about as well, which is why they have announced that starting in 2017, websites found to contain intrusive popups will be taking a hit as far as search rankings are concerned.

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. 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.”

However Google is making some exceptions, such as popups that are used to convey a legal message, like an age check, or to let users know about the use of cookies, and so on. Login dialogues are also exempt to this rule, and also banners that can be easily dismissed, such as app install banners used in Safari and Chrome.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones, Web
Tags: Google