Have you noticed how many popup ads there are these days?
My observation is that as our monitors have grown in size, there is more real estate to advertise. Social media icons on the left, skinny banners at the top, things flying in from the bottom, side or over the top of everything!
While our monitors are larger, the number of people using mobile devices (primarily cell phones and iPads) is growing like crazy. What that means is that there is more focus now on how websites look on a mobile device.
In 2014, Google took action by giving more ranking weight to sites that were mobile friendly. This meant that sites that required pinching and zooming didn’t rank as well as sites that were easily read without being manipulated.
Intrusive Popups Penalized
Effective January 2017, Google started penalizing sites that have intrusive popups.
What will be considered intrusive? Popups that take up the whole screen or that need to be dismissed before reading anything on the site.
Non-intrusive popups include anything that requires a legal obligation and banners that take up a small amount of screen space.
If your visitors are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result, they will get frustrated and leave your site altogether. The end result is that you won’t rank well in the search engines and fewer people will come to your site.
To learn more about popup ads and how it can affect your site, check out this article. It’s only one of hundreds of signals used to rank sites, but it is definitely worth checking out.
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