Guidelines to Avoiding Google’s Penalty Caused by Intrusive Interstitials

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by

Mario
in

Intrusive interstitials guidelines to avoiding google's penalty

This year, Google has made one recent change known as the intrusive interstitial update. This update aims to penalize intrusive popup ads which affect the mobile user experience. No wonder that some websites have experienced lowered mobile rankings. If you are working in SEO service field, this thing may become one of your concerns. But, don’t worry as you can avoid Google’s penalty caused by intrusive interstitials. Figure out the solutions in the passages below.

Decrypting the Intrusive Interstitial Update
First of all, it’s a mobile popup penalty.  Secondly, it’s an intrusive popup penalty. In light of this, Google wants to make sure that ads and popups do not interfere with the user experience. By devaluing pages with popups and overlays on the screen, Google can help users access the content they’ve requested in the first place.

What is the Impact of this Latest Update?
Pages with intrusive interstitials will no longer consider as being mobile-friendly. This is because obstructing content on mobile with ads or other popups is against Google’s guidelines. Ads or popups on screen causes the content inaccessible for a few seconds. In fact, Ads displayed over content are no longer acceptable on mobile. This includes popups that appear when you load the page from Google or when you scroll down.

What Constitutes an Intrusive Interstitial?
Intrusive interstitials will lead to a frustrating experience for desktop and mobile users alike. In fact, it tends to block most or all of a page. This will hinder visitors from experiencing your site as they block the content that visitors seek unexpectedly. In light of this, intrusive interstitials has become the biggest enemy as on desktop they are annoying at best and can ruin the entire experience on mobile.

What is still Permitted and not?
Even though, you have to deal with pop ups ads, but this doesn’t mean that all pop ups are forbidden. In fact, some popups are still permitted, such as:

  • Intrusive popups are still ok on desktop
  • Interstitials triggered by exit intent are still allowed
  • Page to page interstitials will not be penalized

Types of intrusive interstitials that will be forbidden are:

  • a popup or modal window that blocks most or all of the content on a page (this is basically a full-screen interstitial above the header);
  • a standalone interstitial that’s not responsive and that blocks the content;
  • a layout in which the content above the fold has the look and feel of an interstitial and requires dismissal or scrolling in order for the user to reach the main content beneath the fold.

Workarounds
Popups is frustrating indeed, but companies use them as at some points they are effective. So, if interstitials still become the best options to convert users for your websites. You can consider keeping them on the website by a no-index tag in your code. However, this will cut off organic traffic from Google to that page.

Therefore, designers, developers and marketers must create another ways to generate revenue. A sound strategy would be to leverage content marketing to educate audiences and guide them through the buying process. In the other words, you should move away from interruption marketing towards permission marketing.

So, the solutions that you can do related to this situation are; audit your popups, cookie notifications, overlays and big banners. This is to make sure that they comply with Google’s new guidelines. Furthermore, make sure that don’t take up space more than 15% from the screen to avoid penalty.