Ranking Penalties Coming for Pop Ups in 2017

Read a great article this morning. It was about Google giving lower rankings to web pages/sites where the content is not easily accessible to the user when transitioning from search results to the website. This new ranking system will go into effect January 2017.

Pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly. -Google

What this means is the many of you that use Pop Ups or poorly placed ads will most likely see a decrease in your ranking over competitor sites that do not use them.

Down with the PopUp

Personally, I strongly dislike popup opt ins and encourage my clients to not use them. I’m sure at some point when new, they were effective but now they are an overused and abused trend that are ignored more than engaged. Many times I’ve clicked right out of a site when a popup gets in my way. The worst are the kind that are set to popup on every page, or force you to enter in something before disappearing. Think about it, would you like someone trying to sell you something by shoving it in your face every time you move forward?! The same goes for your site, if they clicked “X” once, they don’t want to do it again. Last month when it was time to trim costs, I canceled a subscription to a very popular Stock Photo site. Part of the decision to cancel them over a competitor was the annoying pop up!

Getting rid of your popup is not going to hurt your site, or your ability to grow that subscriber list. In the past 10 months I grew my email subscriber list from 0 to over 3200. This is without popups and having 2 casually placed email opt ins. Those are located in my sites footer and sidebar. If you want a more aggressive email opt in, place the call to actions strategically throughout the site, like under the slide, before the content or after the content, or both. There are other ways to get subscribers to your list without obnoxious popups. If you need help coming up with a good email strategy to replace your current opt in, then contact me. Would love to help.

Are your Ads compliant with Google Standards?

This is very important for those of you who monetize your blog. I see daily sites that have ads not setup correctly. Or many times a poorly coded theme that does not display them right. Check out the Google Standards for third party ads here.

Full article here