Using pop-up ads will affect your website’s Search rankings

Google’s taking the fight to annoying pop-up ads on the Internet. The Search-giant announced, on its Webmaster Central blog, that having pop-up ads and interstitials on your website will affect your Search rankings. However, given the number of websites that figure into Google Search, this shouldn’t completely obliterate such ads. The ranking should particularly come into play when two websites that are equal on Search, are compared. “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,” said Google’s blog post.

Google’s examples for techniques that make content less accessible on websites are,

• 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.

Further, the post mentions that Google will be removing the mobile-friendly label from its Search results. However, the mobile friendliness of a website will still be considered when determining Search rankings. Google is making this change to make Search less cluttered on the mobile screen.