Google begins to penalise interstitials on mobile

Google is keeping up with their efforts in making search more efficient by valuing pages that offer more content. This is part of their campaign to help users find the best answers to their questions with whatever device that they are using. On the other hand, this also means that they have to devalue pages that are “interstitial”.

Basically, anything that prevents the main content of a page to be read because the ad covers the entire screen is an interstitial. Understandably, anyone landing on a page like that will feel frustrated because they can’t immediately see the content that they want to see.

However, pages with banners or the like that only use a “reasonable” size of screen space won’t be affected by these changes. Also worth noting is that pages that are legally obliged to have pop-ups such as age verification of usage of cookies will not be affected by these changes.

Setting Precedents

This isn’t the first time Google is doing something like this. Last year, Google devalued pages that had interstitial that forced users to install mobile apps. Doing this for a couple of months made Google realize that there was a need to enforce this for interstitial pop-ups on a more general scale.

Another thing worth noting is that this new signal just one of the many hundreds of signals that are actively used in ranking. Google warns that the intent of the search query is still a very strong factor so a page may still rank highly as long as it has quality, relevant content. 

Google wants mobile users to have the best possible experience and are doing everything that they can to make the user-experience better, faster and more convenient especially for those mobile uses.