It seems that sudden pop-up ads don’t only enrage us but is equally annoying for Google itself. And it wants to fix it. In a blog post, Google announced that it will punish any website with intrusive advertisements.
The ads are more frustrating when they appear on mobile phones taking over the browser. Google has decided to rank down interstitials and websites that use pop-ups.
Google’s product manager Doantam Phan, said in the blog post, “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.”
According to Google, these ads create “a poorer experience” on mobile, where space is limited by smaller screens. Though it is not wrong, but sometimes these ads take up the entire display, forcing one desperately find the ‘X’ to close them.
Next year from January 10th, these sites popping up all over the screen reading “please subscribe to our newsletter!” will be ranked lowly in search results.
The intention is to bring users to more informative results and Google is on it with its search algorithm. It even began boosting the rank of ‘mobile friendly’ websites last year.
The search engine giant is also dropping the ‘mobile-friendly’ label from all mobile friendly results, which was launched two years ago. The sole aim of it was to help users find pages, where the text and content were readable without zooming and the tap targets were appropriately spaced.
However, Google said it will continue to provide the mobile usability report in Search Console and the mobile-friendly test to help webmasters evaluate the effect of the mobile-friendly signal on their pages.
