Google’s John Mueller stated in an SEO Office Hours on Jan. 22, 2021:
“This is kind of like something where we would slightly demote the website in search. Sometimes, the tricky part is these slight demotions. It’s not the case that we’ll remove the site from search or move it to page 100. But if it’s relevant content, we may still show it on the first page of the search results, just not as highly as possible.”
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4 examples of bad interstitials
1. Checking to see if you’re a spammy bot is bad
Gary Illyes from Google posted on LinkedIn, mentioning:
“Checking if the site connection is secure interstitials you see on some sites, some of the time, is the last search-friendly thing you can do.”
Example:
In short, there are other ways to avoid spammy bots from hitting your site.
If you detect a bot, Mueller recommended serving a 5xx status code to manage the robot detection interstitial.
If you run a hosting service and have a “you might be a bot” interstitial, make sure it uses a non-200 HTTP result code (perhaps 503) and that it doesn’t have a noindex on it. Serving a noindex+200 will result in pages being dropped from search, if search engines see it. pic.twitter.com/LFGQcq2dzf
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) January 17, 2022
2. Redirect to interstitial page
If you show a user page A in the SERPs but redirect it to page B after the click and page B includes a pop-up or interstitial page, search engines will not detect content outside the redirected page.
3. Only displays interstitial
Here is an example of a pop-up display that covers the body copy:
4. Store locator pop-ups
Store locators are really hit or miss on pop-ups.
Here is an example of a good location locator pop-up:
Instead of a pop-up, Xero opts for a banner ad.
Once you click the “Change region” button, you’re brought to this option to select a region.
4 examples of good interstitials
1. Displaying a cookies policy interstitial
Legal interstitials are OK, just as long as search engines can index the content without doing anything special, like asking search engines to click on something to load the background content.
This means GDPR and cookie policies are fine.
Here is an example of a cookies policy built with a pop-up window:
Here is another example of a cookies policy built with a banner at the bottom (my preferred method):
Mueller mentioned in Google Webmaster Office Hours that Google is trying to recognize these legal banners as separate from advertising banners.
2. Requesting age verification
Age verification classifies as a legal pop-up, so there are no issues with these.
Here is an example of an age pop-up done well:
3. Leveraging banners at the top and bottom
Here is an example of Samsung’s promotional ad banner:
4. Exit intent pop-ups that are time or scroll-based
If you’re going to launch a pop-up, I recommend using an exit intent pop-up based on time on the page (20 seconds or more) or scroll depth.
Stay tuned for more updates on the recovery of the interstitial pop-up
I’ll be updating this article as I get more data on the impact of removing the interstitial and recovery.
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