How do intrusive interstitials affect SEO

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What are intrusive interstitials? Intrusive interstitials are similar to how pop-up ads work but the difference is, they block most, if not all, content of a single webpage whether it’s immediately after a user enters from the search results or a different page or triggered by an action of a user on the page . It is a type of interruption marketing which can get higher click through rates but can also annoy users a lot. Uses of interstitials may vary. It can be for newsletters, push notifications, ads, surveys, contact forms, and leads. There are times that they are beneficial to users but more often than not, it ruins the user experience on a website.

If you have intrusive interstitials on your website, it might be pulling down your rankings more than you expect. To give a little bit of a background, let’s go back to 2014 when Google started labeling websites as “mobile-friendly” in the search results. Because CY Lists of the continuous rise of mobile searches that started overtaking desktop searches in some countries that time, Google wanted to make sure websites prioritize having optimized versions for mobile phones. In August 2016, Google published an article about helping users easily access content on mobile and in January 2017, they updated this post announcing that pages where content is not easily accessible to users will be ranked lower.





This specifically targeted intrusive interstitials on mobile where there is a lot less space to work. Nothing was said about interstitials on desktop but we can safely assume that there is also a penalty for them but not as painful as in mobile. According to Google, here are examples of situations where interstitials are deemed intrusive and makes it difficult for users to access content: Interstitials that obstructs users from seeing the main content of the page or the content that they expected to see coming from the search results or while scrolling through the page Redirecting users to a standalone interstitial that users have no options but to see before seeing the content of the page.