Google's Interstitial Warning: Five Months to Fix the Pop-Up Problem

Google published a short announcement on August 23 with a long fuse. Starting January 10, 2017, pages where content is obscured by intrusive interstitials on mobile will rank lower in mobile search results.

The post is unusually concrete about what qualifies. Pop-ups that cover the main content right after a user arrives from search. Standalone interstitials the user must dismiss before reaching the page. And layouts where the above-the-fold area is an interstitial in a page’s clothing.

It is equally concrete about what escapes. Interstitials responding to legal obligation, the cookie notices, the age gates. Login dialogs on genuinely private content. And banners that use a reasonable sliver of the screen and dismiss easily.

The structure will look familiar, because we have now seen this exact shape three times. The mobile-friendly update, announced with a date and criteria. HTTPS, announced as a lightweight signal that compounds. And the app-interstitial rule of last November, of which this is the direct expansion from one pop-up species to the genus.

The lesson from December 2014 barely needs restating. Google tells you what it will do, tells you when, and defines the terms. The runway is five months. This post is the flight plan.

What qualifies, translated to your site

The practical audit, in the order we are running it for clients this month.

First, the email-capture pop-up, because that is the one most of our readers are actually running. The newsletter overlay that fires on arrival, covering the content, is squarely the announced target when it fires for mobile search visitors.

Second, the campaign interstitials. The event promotion, the giving-day takeover, the survey intercept that inserts itself between the search result and the content.

Third, the app-download interstitials that survived last November’s narrower rule by not being smart-banner replaceable. The genus rule now covers them.

Fourth, the subtler layout case worth an explicit check. The above-the-fold ad or promo unit sized so that the actual content starts below the viewport. The announcement’s third example targets it, and some sites run it without thinking of it as an interstitial at all.

The exemptions are not loopholes to engineer toward. They are categories with rationales: legal necessity, genuine privacy, minimal intrusion. History says the criteria get enforced in the spirit announced. Audit against the spirit.

The conflict, faced honestly

The tension this announcement forces into the open deserves respect rather than evasion, because the on-arrival pop-up spread for a reason. It works, in the narrow metric. Email-capture overlays convert. The owned-audience advice we have preached since the Google Reader shutdown makes the email list precisely the asset worth building. Marketing teams will read January’s rule as Google taxing the tool that builds it.

Our position predates the announcement: on-arrival pop-ups were already trading user experience for short-term conversion. It interrupts a visitor who has not yet received any value to demand a durable commitment. Its conversion numbers never counted the bounces, the trust cost, or the ill will of the reader stabbing at a mis-sized close button.

The better patterns were already better before they became compliant. The inline capture placed after the content has demonstrated value. The scroll-triggered slide-in that occupies a corner rather than the content. The end-of-article ask. The footer signup that respectable percentages actually use. And the exit-intent overlay on desktop. Note: the January rule is mobile, and your desktop calculus is your own, though the trust math does not change by viewport.

Our A/B testing advice applies directly. Test the compliant patterns against the pop-up now. Measure list growth and engagement quality. Most teams will find, as ours have, that the visitors captured respectfully open more of what you send. The list the pop-up built was always partly inflated by accident. Build the real one.

Questions from the first two weeks of client calls

The announcement is eight days old and the pattern in the questions is already stable, so the working answers, briefly.

Does this affect desktop? No. The rule as announced applies to mobile search results, though see above for why the trust arithmetic travels.

Does one bad template poison the site? The announcement is page-scoped, ‘pages where content is not easily accessible,’ which means exposure concentrates where the pop-up fires on organic mobile landings. Audit by entrance, not by dread.

What about the cookie notice our counsel requires? Explicitly exempted as a legal-obligation interstitial. Implement it in the modest-banner form and it is a non-issue twice over.

Can we fire the pop-up after a delay, or on the second page? This is the evasion-engineering question, and the house answer is the one history supports. Criteria enforced in the spirit announced make cleverness a poor investment, and the delayed pop-up annoys the same user either way.

Will rankings drop January 10? The honest answer: enforcement history, April 2015 especially, shows measured rollouts rather than cliff events. But the direction is certain, the fix is cheap, and betting the runway on enforcement laziness has never once paid.

The five-month runway, sequenced

• September: inventory. Every overlay, interstitial, and takeover on the site, per the tag-governance census method. Mobile search entrances are the exposure surface, so weight the audit by organic mobile landing pages.

• October and November: replace and test. Swap on-arrival overlays for the compliant patterns above. A/B the alternatives, and let the data settle arguments the announcement will start.

• December: verify. Walk the top mobile landing pages as a search visitor would, the emulator plus real devices, per the mobile-audit method, and confirm nothing intercepts the content.

• January: verify and relax. The pattern says the enforcement lands roughly as announced, and the sites that used the runway will experience the deadline the way prepared sites experienced April 2015. As a Tuesday.

The larger pattern, updated

This is the third announced, criteria-defined ranking intervention in two years. The pattern is now reliable enough to treat as policy. Google keeps spending ranking pressure on things users demonstrably hate.

Which means the cheapest SEO strategy available continues to be the one we have offered since the first algorithm update we covered. Build the experience users would choose, and the announcements keep arriving as confirmation rather than emergency.

The pop-up was always a tax on your users. Now it is also a tax on your rankings, with an effective date. Five months is ample. Use it in the order above, and let January find your site already on the right side of a rule that was, as usual, announced in plain sight.