Anyone experience google penalties for full-screen pop-ups?

[VERBInteractive]

Although we always recommend against onload pop-ups for clients, (we feel the effect the user experience) we do have a few clients that insist on them. I was reading this article the other day https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/17/how-do-i-make-sure-my-site-is-mobile-friendly/ which lead me to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188 and I'm happy to see that Google is going to consider these types of content a downgrade when it comes to rank. My question is 2 fold:

1. Has anyone experienced a drop in organic traffic on mobile due to this update?
2. and do you think this will include user triggered content like photo galleries, bookings, email sign ups?

We haven't noticed any drops yet but it is something we will be keeping a close eye on in the next little while.

Let's hear what the community has to say

[bridget.randolph]

Hi, I don't personally have any case studies of sites experiencing a drop in organic traffic on mobile which can be traced to a pop-up interstitial (maybe in part because my clients don't tend to use pop-ups in that way).

When it comes to user-triggered content, I think it depends on a couple things, including how the user arrives at the pop-up and how the pop-up is implemented technically. Google's view of a site's mobile-friendliness is based on the result of a crawl, and so for instance if it's an event that isn't possible to trigger as a crawler, it shouldn't be a problem. I see it being similar to the use of JS navigation for country selection - it becomes an issue when (for instance) Googlebot can't get past a JS popup or drop-down because it can't click on a link to select a country option or to close the window.

This type of situation is often the case for the sorts of popup that occur when the page loads, giving an annoying user experience, rather than because a user has chosen to click on a link to provide an email address (for example). Google have also made clear that the primary concern is around it being a poor user experience, rather than a technical issue.

So I would see it as:

• Interstitial ad or other pop-up that appears on page load = bad.
• Some sort of non-disruptive data entry box like an email form that only appears when a user chooses to open it and which can be bypassed by a crawler = ok.

However! That's just my theory, I don't have data at the moment to prove or disprove that hypothesis. I would love to hear from other people who have other theories or any practical examples of this. Also, if you're not sure how Google perceives a given page, run it through the Mobile-friendly testing tool and they'll tell you.