Is Google’s mobile popup penalty working?
A quick update on the January 10th rollout
It’s been 20 days since Google rolled out their new algorithm for penalizing mobile popups/interstitials. At Ad Reform, we’re incredibly excited about this update and we’re hoping that a penalty will be enough to incentivize publishers/exchanges to focus on improving ad UX. Here are some of the earliest takeaways from the past few weeks:
1. Google is penalizing for three types of interstitials:
2. Google is accepting these types of interstitials:
3. This won’t just affect publishers/ad tech. Ecommerce, business services (ie. SaaS), and the financial institutions will take a hit due to popups that cover content on the page. Desktop web is likely next on the roadmap for the algorithm.
4. There are a few examples of mobile sites with popups showing a drop in ranking (SEO), but the heavy majority of sites haven’t seemed to have been affected. It appears as though they’re rolling it out slowly, or the algorithm has a difficult time spotting the bad interstitials.
5. Google mentioned that small popups would not be affected by the algorithm, but they have yet to release the definition of small.
6. Google has yet to publish any data showing widespread changes to SEO rankings.
7. This rollout has yielded significantly lower impact results in comparison to the mobile-friendly algorithm change of 2015 (Coined mobilegeddon).
If you want to dive deeper, Glen Gabe has done some of the best data gathering/analysis on the subject over the last couple weeks. We’ll be working on gathering more data over the next month, and will circle back with an update on any changes or comments coming from Google.
