SEO changes for mobile websites coming soon

Google is said to impose penalties on those mobile website which have hardly rejectable pop-ups, making it difficult for users to scroll the contents. Moreover, the label “mobile-friendly” shall also disappear from the searching results. Why?

Few days ago two vital changes related to the searchings results were announced by Google. The first one concerns the already mentioned “mobile-friendly” label, previously added to the perfectly legible mobile websites. However, revolutionary as it may seem, there is certainly much more to come quite soon. Starting from the 10 January 2017, the company shall introduce penalties for the full screen websites which tend to scary the potential users off by showing nerve-wracking, irritating ads right from the very first subpage opened. These ones will be placed much lower in the searching results since then.  

Yet, what made Google decide to eventually get rid of the problematic „mobile-friendly” label in the end? As the company’s own data show, 85 % of all the websites are mobile-friendly already. Thus, in order to exclude unnecessary elements from the searching results, the labels will be removed, even if they keep on being used as the ranking signal anyway. 

Penalties for the full screen ads, taking whole space of the website, seem quite a reasonable solution then. They usually had merely a little cross which did not let close the ad no matter how many times users tried to accomplish it. For the pseudo-marketing people, such a change will definitely be a reason to feel kind of down in the dumps. Still, bear in mind that Google is not determined to punish all the full screen pop-ups, since some of them may be strictly connected with such processes as logging-in for example, therefore, are quite necessary to proceed with scrolling the website. Only those pop-ups which make their mother page hard to view shall be subject to a proper punishment since here’s where the problem is. That’s the core of the problem. If they cover the main navigation, they will have to be removed or allow the users to close these unwanted windows without a delay. 

Summing up, those pages which have pop-ups being admittedly full screen ones, yet helping users to take advantage of the website’s contents, have no reasons to fear. Their development shall carry on unharmed. 

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/23/good-riddance

Katarzyna Parzonka, PR & Event Manager