SEO MYTH #06: “Pop-ups will always hurt my ranking in search.”
As inbound marketers, we care about creating lovable experiences for our website visitors – and, at the same time, we also want to generate leads for our sales teams. To help generate these leads, many marketers have put pop-up forms on their website pages. (After all, pop-ups work.) But the misuse of pop-ups has led to a lot of controversy over whether marketers really should use them.
Even Google had to weigh in on it all by announcing in August 2016 that they would begin to penalize websites that use what they call “intrusive interstitials.” (We call these “crappy pop-ups.”)
The key word here is “intrusive.” Google doesn’t penalize all popups –just the ones that get in the way of a user’s ability to easily access the content on the page when they search on mobile.
For example, pop-ups that a mobile user has to dismiss before being able to access the main content of the page will get you in trouble with Google. On the other hand, pop-ups (including banners and slide-ins) that use a reasonable amount of screen space and don’t disrupt the mobile user experience are just fine.
When they’re used in a way that’s helpful instead of disruptive, popups can be a healthy part of your inbound strategy. Be sure yours offer something valuable and relevant to the people visiting that particular site page, and fit them seamlessly into the context of what your users are doing already so as not to sacrifice user experience
