Google Wants to End Pop-up Ads That Need to Be Clicked to Reject
One of the worst parts of surfing the Internet on your phone is nasty pop-ups that force you to click a tiny X to skip ads. They are frustrating, often don’t work as expected, and make some sites unusable. Good news: Google is hoping to get rid of these ads.
These types of ads are called interstitials, which not only annoy you as a user, but also annoy Google when they try to index pages. Starting next year, Google will punish websites that use the following types of interstitial ads:
Pages that display intrusive interstitial ads are less perceived by users than other pages where content is immediately available. This can be problematic on mobile devices, where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages whose content is not easily accessible to the user when navigating from mobile search results may not rank as high.
January 10 seems a long way off, but that date is probably just enough time to give sites and advertisers a chance to correct their mistakes. Hopefully we’ll see the changes earlier than next year. Check out the Google blog for more details on the changes and what they think are acceptable methods for promoting this intrusive ad.
Helping Users Easily Access Content on Mobile Devices | Central Google Webmaster Blog