If you own a blog or other type of website, you probably know how important it is to rank well in the Google search results.
Like it or not, the majority of a typical site’s visitors usually come from Google. That means anything that causes your site’s pages to tank in the Google search results is a bad thing indeed!
Last month Google announced that they’ll soon start ranking web pages based upon the content found on the mobile versions of the websites “crawled” by their bots. Well, now they’re taking their emphasis on mobile friendliness to an entirely new level.
Here is a direct quote from a recent Google blog post:
“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.”
They then list a few examples of “techniques that make content less accessible to a user”:
- “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.”
In a nutshell, starting on January 11, any web pages that contain an interstitial ad or a pop-up that obscures underlying content will be penalized in the Google SERPS.
Bottom line: If you own a blog or other type of website that depends on Google for a substantial portion of its traffic, I recommend that you completely remove all interstitial ads and content-obscuring pop-ups from your pages right away.
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