Interstitials remain harmful – with one exception
Interstitials are bad, that has been true since 2017 – annoying for the user: inside and bad for search engine optimization. John Müller now says: Not all interstitials are equally harmful.
In the SEO Office Hours, John Müller once again announced Google wisdom: This time interstitials were addressed. These have been considered a negative ranking factor since January 2017: If the crawler detects an interstitial that is not used to select or deselect cookies or to confirm a minimum age, Google assumes that it will bother the user. Accordingly, it is not user-friendly and makes a website less helpful for a search query.
Interstitials are primarily advertisements that cover up the main content or popups that users first have to close before they can even come to the page. This also includes layouts in which the above-the-fold area is similar to a standalone interstitial and users have to scroll inside if they want to see the content for which they clicked on the search result. John Müller confirmed in the SEO Office Hours on August 20 that Google is still seeing interstitials as a negative signal. You are part of the page experience. But he points out that it is important when the interstitials are played.
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Interstitials after first interaction with main content “less of a problem”
in the Search Central Blog Google writes that a popup that hides the main content reduces the accessibility of a website. This applies both in the event that the interstitial is the first thing that users see on the inside of the page after they have clicked on the snippet – but also if it appears while they are scrolling through the page. That means: no matter when, as soon as an interstitial pops up, it is a disruptive factor.
John Müller, on the other hand, says that the evaluation of interstitials primarily relates to the moment in which the user opens the page. However, if advertisements are shown in the course of the session, this is “less of a problem”. Above all, it is important that when the user clicks on the search result, the promised content is shown directly, and not an annoying interstitial, which in the worst case is completely unrelated to the topic. But if the users come to a website, interact with something there and, for example, start a game, then interstitial ads between the levels are “perfectly fine”.
The interstitials are addressed in the SEO Office Hours from minute 35:
