Google takes aim at mobile sites with annoying pop-up ads
Google’s latest policy change might be music the ears of users who get annoyed by pop-up ads on their phones. The tech company announced Tuesday that it plans to crack down on mobile sites with disruptive ads.
“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller,” Google said in a blog post. “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.”
The company explained that a pop-up that covers up the main content on a page falls under this category. Similarly, an “interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content,” as well as an ad that has an “above-the-fold” layout that covers up the top portion of a web page, fall under Google’s big “don’ts” for pop-up ads.
Beyond these guidelines, Google also stated that it would remove the “mobile-friendly” label that appears on some search results. Why? Simply because, in our mobile-dependent age, most search results now fall under this category already.
