Got Pop Ups on your site? Be careful come January

Love them or hate them, 80% of users go to Google first when they search. And Google works really hard to give you the best possible search results so you can find what you are looking for.

Which is why starting in January 10, 2017, if your site has intrusive pop-ups, you might get penalized.

“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.”

There has been a trend coming for a long time where the quality of your website affects your Google ranking, and this is just one more addition.

This new change is specific to mobile sites and is particularly related to websites where the ad covers all or most of the site content. So a good rule of thumb would be to disable your popups on mobile.

Here are specific examples that Google has provided showing the kinds of content that can get penalized:

• Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
• Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

What does this mean for my opt-in?

That’s a good question! One I had myself. I generally dislike pop-ups, but the first time you visit this blog you’ll see one asking you to subscribe. They do have a use. And Google stated in their blog post that banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible are a-okay. So just take a look at yours and make sure it meets that criteria and you should be fine.