Sites can safely display pop-ups on a temporary basis

According to Google’s John Mueller, sites can display pop-ups without being affected by the mobile interstitial penalty, as long as the pop-ups are temporary.

Since the intrusive interstitial penalty was introduced in 2016, Google’s word has been to avoid showing pop-ups to mobile visitors or risking your pages being devalued in searches.

Now, we have learned that it is safe to display pop-ups on mobile, at least for a limited period.

Penalizing intrusive interstitials is not high on Google’s web spam team, says Mueller.

This topic is covered during the Google Search Central office hours feed on January 22. A question is submitted by a site owner asking how to use a mobile pop-up window for a limited time to capture leads.

The site owner wants to run a survey for a week and draw visitors’ attention to it with a pop-up window.

Can the site do this without being devalued in the search results?

Here’s what Mueller says.

Google’s John Mueller on Pop-Ups and Mobile Search

Mueller says it’s unlikely for a site to be downgraded in search results for temporarily showing pop-ups to mobile visitors.

Even if Google downgraded the site, it would not be removed from search results. It might even end up ranking despite the pop-up.

What’s called a “penalty” for interstitials is more of a subtle ranking factor, Mueller explains. Although subtle, it can rely on a site to some extent in Google search rankings.

If you plan to use a mobile pop-up, Mueller recommends that you don’t leave it on for long and show it to all visitors who come to your site.

“I don’t think we would penalize a website for something like this. The web spam team has more to do than penalize a website for having a pop-up.

There are two aspects that could come into play. On the one hand, we have, on mobile, the intrusive interstitial policy, so maybe this is something to watch out for so as not to keep it too long or show it to anyone. everyone all the time.

With this policy, it’s more of a subtle ranking factor that we use to slightly adjust the ranking if we see that there is no useful content on the page when we load it. This is something that could come into play, but rather it is something that would be temporary.

Suppose you start showing pop-ups to mobile visitors, and intend to do so for a short time, but Google picks up the signal right away. What happens then?

It’s not something that will definitely count on your site. Mueller says Google will move on when it re-crawls your site and sees that the pop-up has been removed.

“If you have this survey on your site for about a week, then during that time we could pick up that signal, we could respond to that signal, and then if you removed it, we can basically move on. So it’s not that there will be a lasting effect there.

Finally, Mueller adds that sites can run into issues if they display a pop-up window instead of appropriate content. It is best not to do this because Google will index the content in the pop-up, which will hurt the rankings.

“Another aspect that you should be careful of is that if you show the pop-up instead of your normal content, we will index the content of the pop-up. If you show the pop-up on top of the existing content, which seems to be the case, we would still have the existing content to index and that would be pretty good. “

Listen to the full question and answer in the video below: