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. http://pacedm.com/2016/08/google-punish-mobile-sites-intrusive-ads/ --- Mobile-friendly web pages using app banners Tuesday, Sep. 1, 2015 When it comes to search on mobile devices, users should get the most relevant answers, no matter if the answer lives in an app or a web page. We've recently made it easier for users to find and discover apps and mobile-friendly web pages. However, sometimes a user may tap on a search result on a mobile device and see an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content and prompts the user to install an app. Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page. Starting today, we’ll be updating the Mobile-Friendly Test to indicate that sites should avoid showing app install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. The Mobile Usability report in Search Console will show webmasters the number of pages across their site that have this issue. After November 1, 2016 mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly. This does not affect other types of interstitials. As an alternative to app install interstitials, browsers provide ways to promote an app that are more user-friendly. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/09/mobile-friendly-web-pages-using-app.html
