Dive Brief:

• Google has announced that it will start penalizing sites that use intrusive interstitials in mobile search rankings after January 10, 2017. 
• "Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible," Google wrote in a blog post. "This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller."
• Google also announced that it will remove its “mobile-friendly” label on mobile search results pages (while still keeping it as a factor in search rankings) after finding that 85% of mobile search results pages meet that criteria.

Dive Insight:

Two years ago, Google began adding a “mobile-friendly” label to mobile search results pages to help people conducting mobile searches find websites that didn’t require pinch-and-zoom and had appropriately spaced tap targets. But two years later, the vast majority of sites are now mobile-friendly, according to Google. 

Google has been addressing the needs of mobile users and website publishers alike for some time now. Its efforts may be best exemplified by its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, an open-source initiative designed to provide back-end tech that easily allows publishers to turn ordinary webpages into pages that are optimized for the mobile user, including dramatically faster page load times.

The Google blog post offered examples of mobile page interstitials that would — and would not — affect search results. Examples that would negatively impact page rank include: pop-ups that appear and cover the content mobile searchers are expecting to find and standalone interstitials that have to be dismissed before searchers can access the content. Interstitials that won’t hurt page rank include legal obligations like age verification, log in dialogs, and banners that don’t use too much of the screen real estate and are easily dismissed.

“We previously explored a signal that checked for interstitials that ask a user to install a mobile app. As we continued our development efforts, we saw the need to broaden our focus to interstitials more generally," Doantam Phan, product manager at Google, wrote in the post. “Accordingly, to avoid duplication in our signals, we've removed the check for app-install interstitials from the mobile-friendly test and have incorporated it into this new signal in Search.”