Recently, an SEO client of mine lost 82% of desktop organic traffic to their homepage in one month.
Then, there was another 97% decline in desktop organic traffic in the second month.
Why?
The client launched a mobile and desktop pop-up for all United States visitors. Against my advice, the client hoped the conversions would outweigh the decline in organic traffic.
Here is a breakdown of the intrusive interstitial and its impact on organic traffic.
The impact of before and after an interstitial on mobile and desktop
The homepage pop-up was related to a promotion and not triggered based on a time delay or scroll.
Here is an example of a mobile pop-up:
In the example above, the pop-up also negatively impacts the responsive design.
Here is the example on desktop:
In addition to the drop in organic traffic, the homepage lost 97% of its keyword rankings on desktop.
And saw a 96% decline in mobile rankings for the homepage.
Most of the impact was on branded terms, indirectly impacting the reduction in PPC branded spend.
It also negatively impacted our page experience and page speed.
The website also saw a 10-second decline in page speed.
Before the launch of the pop-up, the website averaged a 3-second load time.
And a 13-second load time after the launch of the pop-up.
You can see the negative impact across page experience with the pop-up with a large number of layout shifts.
The homepage saw a 97% decline in organic traffic cost value overall.
There is no interstitial penalty or manual action
The intrusive interstitial effects rankings, not indexing.
However, other areas of impact may occur, such as soft 404 errors, server speed and the site’s overall page experience.
Remember, Google crawls from the U.S., so if those overlays are only present in European countries, Google will not detect them.
The negative impact of interstitials is a demotion in search
When Google rolled out the Google mobile interstitial penalty on Jan. 10, 2017, it had a shockingly quiet impact. A few days later, SEO professionals started seeing pages lose 10 or more positions in rankings.
When the Google page experience hit desktop sites in February 2022, intrusive interstitials were included as a signal.
It’s important to remember that interstitials do not require manual action (at least not yet), but they still negatively impact your page experience.