Website owners take note. Your mobile site could be penalized for invasive ads that open when the page is loading.
Search engine giant Google announced today its decision to punish mobile pages that have more ads than content, resulting in bad user experience.
Google has announced two new changes to mobile search results.
“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” said Doantam Phan, Product Manager at Google.
Mobile pages will be ranked lower in search results if it has a popup that covers the main content or is using standalone interstitial that needs to be dismissed before accessing the main content.
The changes in the search results for mobile pages will take place starting January 10, 2017.
In addition to that, Google also announced it is doing away with the mobile-friendly label that appears in search results.
Google said that 85% of all pages in the mobile search results are mobile-friendly and hence decided to remove the tag.
The tag particularly helped users find pages where the text and content was readable without zooming.