Mobile SEO Update: The Google Popup Update

After today (Tuesday, January 10, 2017) your website pop-ups for visitors using mobile devices may result in a lower Google rank.

Google announced back in August 2016 that it was setting out to help users easily access content on mobile devices. To that end, they announced that “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

In other words, don’t hide your content behind obtrusive popups.

This is tough news for those of us with mailing lists, especially considering most searches are now done via mobile devices. However, there are still ways to collect email addresses that follow Google’s guidelines.

What You Should Avoid

Google laid out a few examples of “interstitials” (popups) that people should avoid, which really included anything that hid the content people anticipated when they arrived or as they viewed the page. This includes a layout where there’s a lead catcher above-the-fold with the content below-the-fold.

Since we use SumoMe’s email capture tools, we’re able to deliver pop-ups only to desktop visitors. If your email capture tool doesn’t have this functionality, it might be best to turn off popups and see how this update plays out before experimenting.

What You Can Still Do

Fortunately, there are still ways to catch email addresses on pages without using a popup. One could embed forms within blog posts (just not above-the-fold—see above) or use a “banner” type lead catchers at the top or bottom of a page as long as it “uses a reasonable amount of screen space.” SumoMe’s Smart Bar (we have one on this site) is an example of a banner email catcher.

SumoMe appears prepared for the updates as they released a blog post in December outlining ways you can comply with Google using their tools. While they provide a number of great ideas on using email catchers for mobile visitors, they do make a few suggestions that I’m not sure will comply such as using their scroll box tool (a popup that appears after a visitor scrolls through a certain percentage of the page). We’re sticking to using only SumoMe’s Smart Bar for mobile visitors until more information is released on this update.

Google’s announcement provided the following graphic to demonstrate examples of popups that would not be affected by this new update:

One of hundreds of Signals

Google ended their August post with a good reminder: This is just one of hundreds of ranking signals. While it’s probably best to comply with standards Google implements, this update may not be a huge deal for your site if you’re producing awesome content.