Google has shaken the marketing and web-world, again, by announcing yet another change to their search algorithm.

This change will potentially penalize your website, ranking you lower in search, because you’re site is not considered user friendly.

It’s essentially a new way that Google is penalizing websites for not being user-friendly, starting sometime in January, 2017.

So what does this mean for your business website?

What’s the newest change in SEM, SEO and search?

In case you didn’t know, Google occasionally releases changes to their algorithm.

These changes affect how websites rank in their search engine program. This means that websites will be ranked lower for using certain pop-ups.

The change at the beginning of January has to do specifically with what Google has titled as “intrusive interstitials”, but what are they referring too?

Intrusive interstitials are “pop-ups” on your site. These items are essentially email captures.

Their reasoning has to do with user experience. These intrusive interstitials, or pop-up boxes, are not set up where a visitor can easily exit out of them.

These pop-ups are especially annoying for mobile user experiences. Since the pop-up box usually takes up the entire screen and makes it difficult to close them out or for users to continue reading the content on your site.

Google has stated, “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.” This mindset has lead to them implementing SEO penalization for sites damaging a visitors user experience.

What’s a “intrusive interstitials”?

Fortunately, Google has made other statements explaining their rules of what types of pop-ups cause a negative user experience:

• 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 pop-up 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.

 

 

Google also stated three types of interstitials that “would not be affected by the new signal.” Here are the approved types of pop-ups that are okay to use “responsibly”:

• Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation, such as for cookie usage or for age verification.
• Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall.
• Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.

Here is a diagram from Google to convey the above points:

 

What does this mean for your business?

To assure your website is not penalized with the algorithm changes, check your web page and look at any pop-ups. Follow the images and guidelines above, and your site shouldn’t be harmed by the Google algorithm changes.

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We want you to be the master of your website and SEO efforts.

After all, knowing these web-facts is important because how your customers find you is critical to your success, online.

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