If you run advertisements on your site, you better look into how they are displayed on mobile devices right away. According to reports, it appears that Google will begin punishing mobile sites that use pop-up ads that take up the user’s screens. These ads, known as interstitials, are particularly disruptive to the user’s experience, but they are also quite effective for marketers.
The report comes from the Google Webmasters blog, where the product manager, Doantam Phan wrote, “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.”
Those types of pages are not going to rank as high in the Google search pages, which means they will be getting far less traffic. This is apparently going to take effect January 10th, 2017, so site owners do have some time to make adjustments to avoid any type of penalty.
Any marketers that use this type of advertising should make plans to remove it as soon as possible. Keep in mind, however, that pop-ups like this that are displayed for age verification or cookie notifications are not going to be impacted by the change.
You can read the full notice from Google HERE.
