Demystifying Google’s new Popup rules
Today’s task is to make some sense of Google’s new rules regarding popups.
We have all been told that getting readers to subscribe to your mailing list is the new key to the kingdom and the best way to do that is to use a popup subscription form to encourage signups.
We can argue whether those two statements are correct until the cows come home but that’s not the focus of this post.
As the graphic above indicates, Google is only concerned with popups on mobile devices with it’s latest announcement. Just a quick peek at Google stats will show that more and more sites are accessed primarily via mobile devices these days. Because of this, Google is focusing on mobile use. If you remember, Google previously took aim at sites that didn’t meet their version of mobile friendly. After a bit of last minute scrambling, many sites now comply with the guidelines.
You can check your site at this link.
Now that Google has us toeing the line with respect to being mobile friendly, it is setting it’s sights on popups. Even I had to dig out a dictionary when I first read Google’s pronouncement.
A direct quote from Google’s blog post in part reads:
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. 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.
Really….what the heck is an “intrusive interstitial?”
Clearly, someone without a degree in Engineering needs to write their blog posts 
