Google confirms rolling out the mobile intrusive interstitials penalty yesterday

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Google has officially confirmed they have begun rolling out the intrusive mobile interstitial penalty yesterday. Google warned us that this was coming almost a half-a-year ago and it did start rolling out on January 10, 2017 – as Google promised.

Google’s John Mueller and Gary Illyes confirmed the penalty began rolling out yesterday.

This penalty only impacts intrusive interstitials that happen directly after going from a Google mobile search result, to a specific page. It does not impact or penalize pages after that, so if you have a intrusive interstitial that comes up later in the click path on your web site, this won’t impact it – it only looks for the intrusive interstitial after the click from the Google search results page.

Google said this targets “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

Google explained which types of interstitials are going to be problematic, including:

  • 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.

Here is a diagram from Google to convey the above points:

google-mobile-interstitials-penalty-bad

Google listed three types of interstitials that “would not be affected by the new signal” if “used responsibly.” Those types are:

  • Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
  • Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
  • Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Here is a diagram from Google to convey the above points:

google-mobile-interstitials-penalty-good

We have yet to hear of webmasters complaining about being hit by this penalty but as things change, we will let you know.


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