Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2015, and reports news from that month. April of that year refers to Google’s April 2015 mobile-friendly update, and this Tuesday is 1 September 2015. The mobile traffic share of just over 50% is the blog’s figure at the time.
In April this year, Google updated its algorithm to penalise blogs and websites that weren’t ready to offer a useful experience to people visiting them on mobile phones, which forced site owners to change their templates and adapt their content to smartphones.
This Tuesday, Google announced another update worth keeping in mind. This time, Google intends to penalise pages that show an ad covering the whole screen, forcing users either to wait for the ad to close or to close it themselves. Google considers this kind of advertising annoying, since the user clicked on the search result to see the content, not a full-screen ad.
Of course, Google’s algorithm won’t distinguish between an ad and a box asking visitors whether they want to subscribe by email or follow the page on Facebook.
Google illustrated the change with two images. The first showed what Google doesn’t want; the second showed a viable alternative: a banner-style ad space that leaves most of the content visible.
The number of people visiting websites from smartphones has grown much faster than expected in a short time. Without going any further, for a few months now slightly more than 50% of the visits to this site have come from mobile phones and tablets, a sign of an increasingly marked shift towards browsing on smartphones. Since Google is the dominant search engine, having a mobile-friendly website is a must today, and so is keeping your content clear of full-screen ad “takeovers”.
Featured image: Susan Jane Golding, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
