Punishing Sites with Mobile Popups
Last year, Google announced that it was going to start penalising sites that display certain types of popups on the MOBILE version of the website. The most common examples of mobile popups you will have seen is where you visit a website and instantly get a ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ box, or some kind of special offer, which hides the main content of the website.
Google is taking this action against mobile sites to make user experience better for mobile users. Google can’t force website owners to take down mobile popups, but it can penalise them in the mobile search algorithm.
The news around the web is that this penalty has now kicked in, so it’s important that if your website contains this type of popup, you rethink it. These types of popups can be useful when it comes to user engagement and earning quick conversions for things such as sales, newsletter signups and website registrations, so don’t panic and delete these completely. We just need to think of ways around it that won’t mean your website is punished in the Google Mobile Search results.
Google won’t punish sites for all mobile popups, it’s just the ones that instantly appear when you’ve gone from a search on Google, clicked on the website and you can’t see what the site is about due to an instant popup over the content. If you have a popup that appears when a user clicks something, for example a lightbox image, a popup contact form or a new browser window, so all of these should still be fine.
Google released this image to help explain. Contact us if you need some help.
