Google Pop-up Penalty Starts Today
This is a follow up to this post from last year.
TRANSCRIPT
Happy New Year, Rankers! Welcome back. Are we all set for a big 2017? If you are and you’d like us to cover topics that we haven’t so far, just let us know. Simply leave us a comment on YouTube, the blog, or Facebook, and let us know if there is something in particular that you’d like us to cover on the show, which happens to be in it’s thirteenth year.
Penalty Week
This week will see the arrival of a penalty for mobile. In case you missed our show on this last year, Google is bringing out a penalty for websites that are serving pop-ups, or interstitials, or similar, to their mobile users.
Now the deadline for fixing this problem is today, or this week in general. The announcement basically said that if your site was having pop-ups, for say collection of email addresses, then it is fine on the desktop, but a great inconvenience for mobile users. We’ve already had clients ask us what is or isn’t suitable. Google is saying that if you continue to do it, they will reduce your visibility in mobile search. For many categories, such as fashion brands, that would constitute the vast majority of search traffic.
What’s Acceptable?
Which leads to the obvious question, “What can we do?” Google has said that there are a couple of things that are acceptable. Cookie notices. In some jurisdictions you have to put up a notice saying that you are collecting cookies. That’s an acceptable pop-up. App in-store. If there is an app for when users hit your site and you want to encourage them to install the app rather than use the website, that’s also an acceptable pop-up. Providing it’s taking up no more space than required for a banner. It is not acceptable to be using an interstitial, or a whole screen pop-up that pushes all the content down. Anything along those lines will result in you losing mobile search.
Unfair Penalty?
Not really. In my opinion it’s probably a good penalty, as far as penalties go, as we all hate pop-ups. They work, and we know they work, but not on mobile so much. I’ve only found one site today that is still breaking the rules, so maybe the warning has been heeded.
If you’ve already got an app in-store pop-up, then use that same size for any other pop-ups on mobile. If you do not, then you will lose mobile search traffic. For certain industries, that could be the majority of your traffic. Keep a close eye on your mobile site.
If you have anything you want us to cover this year, let us know and we’ll see what we can do. Maybe you’d like more of this, less of that, some interviews, or whatever. Thanks very much. We’ll see you next week. Have a great 2017. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
