Interstitial Penalty?
-
We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup.
Can I assume that this is a problem?
-
At this point the interstitial "penalty" only affects mobile sites that show a full screen interstitial to readers. It's not really a penalty, but rather, what Google says is that it can cause a site to lose its "mobile friendly" label which could result in a reduction of rankings.
What you are doing is pretty common and wouldn't result in a penalty. However, if it is really annoying to users and causes a lot of people to immediately click away and go back to the Google results then this could possibly negatively impact rankings. This would be a good case for A/B testing to see if you get significantly better user engagement when they don't see the popup. If so, then that's a sign that the popup is too intrusive.
-
Hi there.
Why do you think it would be a problem? I assume you want users to see that popup, as well as you don't want to hide anything from google. So, as long as everything is clear both to search engines and users, I don't think there is a problem.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Duplicate content created by website Calendar - A Penalty?
A colleague of mine asked me a question about duplicate content coming from their event calendar. I don't think this will affect them negatively, but I would love some feedback and thoughts. ThanksOne of my clients, LifeTech Academy, is using my RavenTools software. Raventools has reported a HUGE amount of duplicate content (4.4K instances).The duplicate content all revolves around their calendar and repeating events (http://lifetechacademy.org/events/)The question is this - will this impact their SEO efforts in a negative way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bill_K0 -
Recovered from Manual Penalty but rankings still suck
Hi All, We got a penalty Last March 2014 ( Side Wide Link - unnatural links) which we recovered from quickly and this changed to Partial Match penalty (impact links) which we recovered from back in December 2014. Our Site profile has been cleaned up but our rankings still suck for some of our main keywords (+500) . Also our traffic and local rankings still suck in some cases. From an SEO point of view our site is pretty good, we've done everything google has recommended including schema.org, mobile responsive, unique content (which we write regulary) and we only have a few duplicate pages. Our domain authority is better than our competitors but yet our rankings and traffic are still no way as good as theirs. Do anyone know if recovering from an impact links penalty take longer than 4 months . I know that google says than it discounts those links but I get the feeling google may be looking at an old dataset due to not rerunning panda & penguin since our penalty was removed and this may be whats affecting things. Does anyone have any ideas? I am more than happy to post my url if someone fancies taking a quick look ? to see if it's anything obvious ? thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
Hello, I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords. Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc. Now my question is: 1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net? 2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this? 3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal? Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php. Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hpk0 -
Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links FROM My Site - Where?
Hi Mozzers, I've just received a manual penalty for one of my websites. The penalty is for 'unnatural links from my site which I find disturbing because I can't see that anything really wrong with it. The website is www.lighting-tips.co.uk - its a pretty new blog (only 6-7 posts) and whilst I've allowed guest posting I'm being very careful that the content is relevant and good quality. I'm only allowing 1 - 2 links and very few with proper anchor text so I'm wondering what has been done so wrong that I'm getting this manual penalty? Am I missing something here? Thanks in advance. Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronGro0 -
Would this drop indicate a manual penalty?
Website short link: f c w . i m (copy and remove the spaces) A few weeks ago now we dropped from around page 2 all the way to around page 14 for they keyword watches on Google UK. We have remained around the level of page 12-17 ever since. Other important keywords which we monitor have slowly moved from page 1 positions onto page 2 or the bottom of page 1. Of course this is really worrying us as we are an e-commerce website and we are in peak season. Natural suspects would be duplicate content issues, crawl issues or bad links. All of which we have looked into and spent the past month improving to the best of our ability. I have gone through almost all of the content on the website. We have our own written descriptions on our 5000 products and have identified a small amount with issues using Copyscape. We have lots of unique customer product reviews and we have our own unique blog. I have looked into Crawl Issues and fine tuned URL parameter settings, usage of canonical and added next and prev tags. All of the faceted navigation which shouldn't be indexed has been excluded through canonical for well over a month and again recently using URL parameters in WT. Our link profile is small and doesn't contain a lot of spam links - we have identified some and wish to get them removed but even so I don't think the small quantity of links (a lot of which are nofollow also) would justify dropping us over around 100 places for a clearly relevant keyword. The only other thing that might be an issue is a large number of on page links. This is partly due to drop down page navigation. All our pages are being indexed by Google though so I'm not sure if it is a problem. You could argue it dilutes page rank, but you would think Google's algorithms would take recurring page navigation into account somehow - removing it would probably be detrimental to our users. So really we wanted to see if any SEO experts could help me out with this. It seems to us that it is either something we have already identified (causing a lot more impact than we would expect following the latest Google updates) or something else. Maybe a manual penalty? Thanks if you read the whole thing! Didn't intend to write this much really!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Scott.lucas1 -
Penalties forcing us to move to a new domain
My ecommerce company has been under an unnatural link penalty for some time now. Over 2 months, removing 13,000 back links and submitting two reconsideration requests we have still been denied. We think the best route to take is to start a new domain. Does anyone have advice, resources, articles or anything else that can help us with this transition? Just a recap : we want to move our existing site to a new site and pass no negative "link juice". Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brads070 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1