Google to downrank pages with intrusive interstitials

[Robert Charlton]

In a Webmaster Center Blog post that covered several aspects of mobile accessibility, Google announced some news that IMO is long overdue... that it is going to target pages with intrusive interstitials that block content....

Helping users easily access content on mobile
Google Webmaster Central Blog
Tues, August 23, 2016
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

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....

Intersititial techniques they are targeting include popups covering main content during the navigation process, standalone interstitials preceding the main content, and blending a standalone interstitial with the above-the-fold portion of the page.

[bwnbwn]

about friggin time way overdue

[ecommerceprofit]

I agree...finally.

[aristotle]

For mobile only? Isn't it just as obnoxious on larger screens?

[ergophobe]

@aristotle - my reaction as well. I expect that eventually after they see how it works on mobile we'll see it for desktop

The two differences that come to mind are
- often on mobile I find it much harder to close popups, popovers, interstitials,etc
- mobile connections are commonly slower, so it's more intrusive because you wait so long for it to load

So you can argue that it impacts the mobile experience more strongly than the wired experience.

[JS_Harris]

Huh? I find this confusing(tongue in cheek)

Adsense has been hounding me with suggestions that I enable these types of ads for months despite the fact that the ads themselves are against their own adsense terms(technically they expand over other ads).

What's good for Google isn't always good for adsense, I wish these two would get together more often. Now if only I could block the popups that push an ebook or mailing list on me.

[7_Driver]

So is this yet another example of Google's right hand (Search) not knowing what the left hand (AdSense) is doing?

Adsense has been pushing "Page level ads" - anchor/overlay ads and full-screen "vignette ads" for months. Are these going to compromise rankings? Or not?

I don't think it's unreasonable for publishers to expect some guidance on how announcements like this affect Google's own advertising products.

But it appears that's too much to expect...

[keyplyr]

@7_Driver it seems that way doesn't it.

Similiar to Google's push for faster loading mobile pages, even hijacking pages and replacing them with weblight, when their own Adsense or Google+ api is most often the main offender.

However, this is a significant announcement and should impact the wild west attitude of some ad publishers.

[edited by: keyplyr at 10:04 am (utc) on Aug 24, 2016]

[vegasrick]

I think the difference is that Adsense's FULL SCREEN ads come up "between page loads" on the site, where the new Google rule appears to be targeting Full Screen ads that hit you as soon as you hit the website from a search result.

[keyplyr]

I wonder if this will include the pop-up ad-blocker blocker announcements or those cookie notifications that often block content?

[engine]

ergophobe is correct, the mobile experience is significantly diminished by these over aggressive pop-ups. Quite a few times i've discovered that my screen appears to be locked is because there's an apparently invisible interstitial: The pop-up isn't' displaying correctly as intended, or there's no [X] to close as i cannot scroll to it. It's bad design and implementation, imho.

[Simon_H]

I disagree that interstitials are worse on mobile than desktop/tablet. The points previously raised are separate; if the issue is that some mobile interstitials can't be easily closed, then Google could just penalise sites that do that, and if the issue is download speed, then Google could just penalise sites with heavy interstitials. But if Google is going to penalise *any* mobile interstitial above a certain size, then it absolutely should be penalising any desktop interstitial too. Irrespective of device, they breach webmaster guidelines because they show Google something different to users, they're a horrible UX and they are an example of webmasters being intentionally deceptive.

[EditorialGuy]

But if Google is going to penalise *any* mobile interstitial above a certain size, then it absolutely should be penalising any desktop interstitial too.

I agree completely. Still, it's worth noting that Google isn't talking about "penalizing," it's talking about a ranking signal.

The question I have is how strong that new ranking signal will be. Stronger than the signals for https and page speed? One can only hope so.

[jambam]

Or maybe google is just doing what it always does and is just saying this knowing full well all the webmasters will jump..........

Make no difference to me as I dont have ads on my site... but doubt I will benifit from this because google aint gonna be putting anything in its algo.

[bwnbwn]

Here is why I think it has come to this. Google tracks anything and everything even your last poop. If I get one of the ads on any device done with that. I feel Google has seen more and more of this behavior and has FINALLY determined people are sick of it.

[EditorialGuy]

Make no difference to me as I dont have ads on my site

Unless I'm mistaken, this is about interstitials, which may or may not be ads. I personally would love to see Google downrank sites that display "Sign up for our newsletter" popovers that need to be closed before readers or shoppers can see the page content.

[blend27]

--Sign up for our...--

You mean like Pinterest?

[samwest]

How about cracking down on sites that display over 3 intrusive ad blocks per page and use auto start youtube videos. That would include almost all of the page 1 listings in my vertical.

[jambam]

If this is not just about ads then this is something publishers should not stand for.
Authors should be allowed to put whatever they like on their book cover so to speak.. freedom of speech an all or does that only apply to google when in court and how their computer generated rankings is their freedom of speech?

[koan]

You mean like Pinterest?

Facebook also has an irritating popover ff you're not logged in to your account, pushing you to log in or register. It finally made me snap and get a Firefox add-on (Behindtheoverlay) that removes these popovers at the click of a button.

[koan]

jambam, authors are free to do what they want, as long it's legal. Google is also free to do what they want.

[Robert Charlton]

A post from Gary Illyes on Twitter [twitter.com...] that the upcoming intrusive interstitial ad algo will act at the page level, and not at the site level....

Gary Illyes
@methode

@digitalwhat - the algorithm affects individual pages, not whole sites @googlewmc

Thanks to Barry Barry at SER [seroundtable.com...] etc for the alert.

PS: Personal note... I'm glad to see that some publications that I read regularly are already dropping these annoying overlays. Many of them, btw, were SEO publications... and you'd think that they would have known better in the first place.

[keyplyr]

One of Bing's mobile info pages loaded a Microsoft Cloud Hosting overlay just last night.

[Selen]

Google should also derank pages that have big logos (let's say over 60px height and over 110px width) - they don't bring anything useful and require users to scroll pages and higher loading time, it annoys users on mobile especially.

[aristotle]

60px height and over 110px width

Hmm -- that seems pretty small to me. Anyway, this shouldn't be a problem if you use a good design. I code my logos to automatically shrink down to fit on smaller screens. It's true that a fixed size can work okay in some cases. But usually you need to keep suitable proportions or it won't look right on big screens

[martaay]

so... pages like this then: [plus.google.com...]

good, this cant come soon enough