Pagerank and popup windows

Using popups windows decreases Googles Pagerank?

[eflouret]

Hello,

Recently my site's pagerank increased from 5 to 7. At this moment my 70+ page site receives near 700 visits from google.com, and a couple of hundreds from other countries googles.

This month I'm hosting a software giveaway, and susbscriptions to this giveaway are rather low (at least to my expectations). Last year I used the "onUnload Popup window" technique to atract subscribers to my mailing list, with a hughe success (1000% increase). After growing a database big enough I stopped poping out windows and never again used that technique.

Now I want to use that technique to raise the number of subscribers to the giveaway I'm hosting at my site. But the problem is that I'm afraid to lose page rank (or, worse, be banned!) by google for using popup windows.

My popup windows are absolutely related to my site, appear upon leaving the page and cannot be confused with other site advertising.

I emailed Google about this but, as I expected, no answer came back.

Will I lose pagerank or any other damage can be caused by using this popupwindow?

Any input will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Enrique Flouret
Web Site Owner
The Photoshop Roadmap

[taxpod]

Just out of curiosity, where did you get the idea that using pop-ups would decrease pagerank? Just as an example, About.com spawns a couple windows off of most pages. yet many of their pages have PR7 or 8? So, just based on that, I would have to conclude that it doesn't happen. But I could be wrong and can't wait to see what some of the experts have to say.

[nipear]

I've also wondered about this, we have a small pop-up that comes up to first time visitors to join our mailing list. It's java based, so I don't think google can see it.....

But then again Google has stopped my adwords because of the pop-up. They gave me some explaination about no pop-ups and repeated pop-ups. It's safe to say they don't like pop-ups. But if it's java based I wouldn't think that googlebot sees it... but I'm not certain.

[Mike_Mackin]

>About.com spawns a couple windows

So does AOL
The window covers the search box :(

[taxpod]

How true!

[eflouret]

The reason for this question is because, just like NIPEAR, my adwords select ads were also rejected because I had a popup window at my site.

But, judging for your answers, there will be no problem in having a popup window at my site.

In fact, there are many marketing sites with high page rank, and everybody knows that almost all internet marketing sites use popup windows to gain subscribers. For example, Wilson Web has a page rank of 7 and has a popup window after leaving the first page. Examples like this and others like about and aol, even Adobe and Yahoo have popup ads. Of course, those sites are run by BIG GUYS ;-)

Well, perhaps there is no reason to worry. Just wanted to know about other webmasters experience on this subject. Page Rank is so difficult to increse these days! :-)

Thanks everybody,

Enrique