Pop-Ups, Overlays, Modals, Interstitials, and How They Affect SEO

Pop-ups, overlays, modal, interstitials are sometimes useful and annoying most of the times.

But have ever wondered how they may affect your SEO, and if they did, is it good or is it, bad?

If you don’t know the answer common let’s explore it.

Let’s look into what pop-ups, overlays, modal, interstitials are?

They are basically the part of UX.

Now when the topic of UX has already got in the way, not to forget that SFWPExperts is the best in class website design company Los Angeles that designs every website while keeping the perspective of customers in the mind and adding value to the business of its clients because we know what’s the importance of great user experience for visitors, right?

 

Pop-ups

There are a variety of pop-ups like the dialog box or the new window that opens up when you click randomly on the webpage. Well, it may help you to generate ad revenue but according to Google, it’s not really a good thing. Meaning bad SEO score in fact many browsers will block this.

 

Overlays

These are kind of similar to the pop-ups, but they will not cause as much trouble as the pop-ups do, according to Google anyway. Layouts those messages that appear randomly in front of your screen prompting you to sign up for a newsletter and some other similar messages. These cause much more trouble in the mobiles than in pc. Which, we will explore in a few minutes.

 

Modals

Let’s just say these are boxes in a webpage where you can edit stuff. Where you actually interact with the background data rather than say a pop-up or a layout. For instance, editing a image online. Unless they spammed or advertising unnecessarily, they won’t cause much trouble.

 

Interstitials

You can compare this to the unskippable ads that you see at the beginning of the video in Youtube. Which people don’t really like. Yeah, there the website likes Forbes that does the same.

 

What Are The Factors That Matter For SEO?

Now let’s take a look at factors affecting SEO.

 

A) Timing

Time is a really important factor. Sometimes you can see the layouts or pop-ups at the very beginning, or in the middle or in between 80% to 100% mark.

Each of these appearances will be treated differently. And based on the type of content shown and the amount of time shown is also important.

If the appeared content is taking even a little bit of time, it will affect your SEO.

The smaller the duration the better your SEO score will be.

B) Interaction

Google has updated its mobile guidelines recently. Based on the interaction of the element with content like the duration, whether it’s affecting the readability or is it, not easy to terminate will be the deciding factors. Later the owners will be penalized by Google.

C) Content

Sometimes we can observe that few websites will show us a message asking for the permission to use cookies, or taking our consent. These types of messages are not affected by Google’s guidelines whereas the ads, on the other hand, treated differently and harshly if they don’t obey the rules.

D) Conditions

Some people knowingly or unknowingly will create few conditions that might fly under the Google’s radar but not anymore. Make a wrong move, well you will be penalized. Sometimes websites and systems are not optimized enough to deal with it since it’s still considered as UX.

E) Engagement Impact

It’s no secret that Google monitors the activity of every website that has been visited via Google. So whenever your bounce rates increase Google will deem your UX as poor, which may affect your SEO.

 

Best Practices

After reading all the data provided above, it’s pretty obvious that having bad elements in your UX will definitely hurt your SEO.

So try not including harmful elements in your UX.

Also know the following information about your website that will help you, while designing UX

  • Bounce rate
  • Browse rate
  • Return visitor rates
  • Time on site after the element appears

Finally, mobile browsing is becoming a hot topic and Google is really working hard towards increasing mobile experience. So it’s better to sacrifice some ads rather than getting completely banned from the internet (worst case) and mobile users are increasing every day so keep that in mind.

Now for mobile applications, who is going to develop it better than SFWPExperts, the widespread WordPress website design company. We build mobile-friendly and tablet friendly website designs that do not disrupt the user experience of your visitors, no matter the device they are accessing with.