Nowadays interstitial advertisements have become the most popular advertisement format. Marketers started using them more often because of their high impression rate to increase CTR and revenue. Using the best practices while implementing interstitials, really do magnetize the customers. Let’s take a closer look.

What are interstitials?

Interstitials are pop-up content that appears before or after loading an expected content page. They usually appear at natural transition points to display advertisements or offers, age queries or information about the use of cookies and other information that are available to promote their services on the website.

Intrusive interstitials are spammy and non-responsive pop-ups that lower the page experience on your website. Therefore, Google considers pages with intrusive interstitials as not mobile-friendly and enforces penalties to websites providing a bad user experience to the users.

Let us check the intrusive interstitials that are penalised by Google:

• A semi-transparent pop-up that blocks the contents of the webpage

• Standalone full-screen interstitials forcing the users to scroll up to see the content.

• Deceptive content blocking interstitials that block all the content of a website.

So, if your site is riddled with intrusive interstitials that ruin the user experience then your page is liable to be penalised.

5 tips to use interstitials without affecting your rankings

Here are the five best practices that can help to make your interstitials effective without impacting your SEO rankings and boost search traffic.

1. Consider timed pop-ups

If it is necessary to continue to use interstitials then try to redesign them as less intrusive as possible. The primary thing you can change is the timing of every interstitial. Instead of displaying a pop-up every time a user accesses your site, plan it to show up at the scheduled time when the user finishes reading the content. Also, limit the display time of the pop-up such that it automatically closes after three seconds of inactivity. These timed interstitial ads are only as effective as your content.

2. Understand which interstitials are not be used

The term interstitial broadly means banners, pop-ups, modals and overlays that come up on web pages. They are usually categorized into informational and promotional ads. These interstitials can be useful, but some may cause user experience issues and affect how search engines crawl a website, but all interstitials are not intrusive. John Mueller advises that the interstitials triggered by exit intent, that don’t appear over the main content blocking the users to access the information are still allowed and these are possibly not targeted by penalty.

3. Interstitials on the desktop are still permitted

Some webmasters have come up with a solution with regards to the interstitial penalty, which is to retain intrusive pop-ups in the desktop version and hide them on all mobile platforms. There are many website plugins wherein they allow you to display intrusive pop-ups on specific platforms. However, it is better to turn away from using them since it lowers the user experience but if you cannot then look for other alternatives excluding intrusive pop-ups.

4. Use pop-ups on sources other than Google search results

Another option is to put pop-ups in web pages that can be accessed through sources other than Google search results. Note that incorporating one or two interstitials is ok, but filling the site with numerous pop-ups will eventually get your site penalized.

5. Check out for gray area interstitials

Google devalues the sites with too many intrusive advertising formats that are negatively impacting the overall experience of the users. So, you should avoid including ads such as classic interstitial ads, splash ads, new window pop-ups, and other intrusive ads that easily redirect visitors when clicking on them or difficult to close pop-ups. Avoid these grey areas to offer a positive user experience that will boost your rankings in search results.

Conclusion

Google’s objective is to make the websites more accessible and usable especially for mobile users. Therefore, if your popups serve a purpose then they will add value for the user but there are certain types of interstitials that are not tolerated by Google and might negatively impact your SEO. So, understand which interstitials are accepted.

If you are concerned about your website’s SEO or rankings, check out our SEO Strategy and Services. Our leading digital marketing agency is a one-stop solution for your multiple problems. Contact us today to get a quote on our SEO Services.

Google has come back again with a new update called the page title update. Google’s Danny Sullivan has confirmed that Google is updating the way it creates page titles for SERPs. Our blog is a complete guide for you to know all about this update and how it works? So, let’s find out.

Users use one of the major approaches to determine which search results might be relevant to their query by examining the titles of listed web pages. Therefore, Google search makes great efforts to provide the best titles in search results to connect searchers effectively with the content produced by webmasters and publishers.

Hence, Google was displaying dynamic page titles in the SERP through minor adjustments based on the query issued. But now it has introduced a new system for producing titles regardless of the query.

What is Google’s Page title update and how it impacts SEO?

The page title tag reveals the search engine and the users about the nature of the information available on their web page. It is placed in the head section under the meta tag in HTML. The title tag is what customers can see in the SERPs above URL when searching for a query. Therefore, it is very important for improving SEO.

As we all know, Google has announced a new algorithm update to SEO experts which might encourage website owners and publishers to take a different approach while creating page titles to improve readability and increase the relevance in search results. In this case, a more relevant title will get more clicks.

With the new update, the Google search engine will no longer generate web page titles based on the query; instead, it will produce page titles that best suit all documents in general irrespective of what the user searches.

Ever since the new algorithm update is live in search results, the experts within the SEO community have extensively documented and observed that Google is indeed rewriting page titles by using other text on the page and Google’s Danny Sullivan has also confirmed this. He says that the new algorithm update is using more than HTML text to replace the page titles in instances when it considers a page’s HTML title tag doesn’t adequately describe the page.

Google reviews the other text contained in the page such as the header tags, H1 tags or main visual title on a page, and any other notable text throughout the content that users see when they visit the page. It may also consider the text within links. Sullivan further demonstrated that Google is rewriting title tags because often page title tags fail in describing a page’s topic well. They can be either stuffed with keywords, or too lengthy and sometimes contain no text or boilerplate text.

Thus, Google’s latest page title update is more dynamic and reciprocates to any changes done to HTML tags. It shows that even when you modify the HTML title tag of a page, Google will consider the updated text and react accordingly.

Can we opt out of this update?

There are no exceptions to Google’s new system and websites can’t opt-out of having Google rewriting their page titles. However, Sullivan proposes that Google should provide a feature in the Google search console for website owners to choose whether they want the search engine to replace their HTML title tags or not and can also have the option to retain a few of their original page titles.

Finally, Google believes that the new update creates titles that are easier to read and searchers would prefer the update over Google’s previous method of generating titles.

Conclusion

Although Google is considering a different approach to generate web page titles, webmasters should never conclude that optimizing HTML title tags is not worth it. 80% of the time the original HTML title tags will still be considered. So, webmasters should always focus on creating unique and optimized HTML titles.

If you are concerned about your website’s SEO or rankings, check out our SEO Strategy and Services. Our leading digital marketing agency is a one-stop solution for your multiple problems. Contact us today to get a quote on our SEO Services.

5 common misconceptions you should know about SEO

1.If you have optimized for Google, you don’t need to do for all other search engines

2. Longer content boosts your SEO rankings

3. Repeating keywords is very important in SEO

4. Social signals don’t affect rankings

5. Google penalize for duplicate content

Conclusion