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Google will punish sites that use annoying pop-up ads
- bcardarella 9y agoThis is from over a year ago
- tangue 9y agoAnd considering the state of the web I doubt there was any punishment at all.
- reconbot 9y agoI'm not so sure about that. They change up things a lot. Search is only part of the equation however, people can still buy an add to show you anything they like. So these practices aren't going away, they're just pushed into an arbitrage situation.
- cpncrunch 9y agoGoogle later confirmed that the update went live in Jan: http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-rolling-mobile-intrusive-interstitials-penalty-yesterday-267408 http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-rolling-mobile-i... I actually just added a full-screen video popup to a site a few days ago, and I made it so that it won't appear to googlebot. This wasn't for deceptive purposes, just because it wasn't relevant. I only show the video once to users, and it doesn't appear when they go back to the site...it's just a walkthrough of our products, which many people seem to need. I suspect many sites will check for googlebot and not show their popups to avoid this penalty.
- jeromegv 9y agoShowing something different to GoogleBot than your users is against terms of service, all good until you get caught.
- cpncrunch 9y agoIn my own case, I'm showing the same thing as users who have been there > 1 times. I could remove the check and it wouldn't make much difference, as gbot uses cookies anyway. For sites that always show the popup to users and never show it to gbot, I agree. However I've seen a lot of scammy sites that do this kind of time so I don't know how likely google is to find out about it.
- ryanwaggoner 9y agoYou're not getting "caught", and Google can fuck right off with any "terms of service" that I never agreed to about how I respond when they scrape my site without permission. I know that there are practical concerns here, but Google has done a masterful job of shaping the conversation so that many people think anything not sanctioned by Almighty Google with regard to SEO (let alone actual "blackhat" tactics) is illegal or immoral.
- squeaky-clean 9y agoIt's not illegal, but if you're hiding content from Googlebot because you don't want it to derank that page, once they crawl it with an agent that hides the fact that it's Google, they will then derank your whole website. So it's not illegal, but if you think you're beating Google by doing it, they're well aware of this workaround and will punish you harder. If you don't care about ranking, then no biggie. But why would you manipulate your web server like that if you weren't trying to rank.
- Karunamon 9y agoYou’re giving permission to scrape by way of having a page accessible to the general public. If googlebot is bothering you so much, install a two line robots.txt and it’ll go away.
- jiggunjer 9y agorobots can ignore your /robots.txt.
- tyingq 9y agoGoogle is very concerned about ads that visually block text content. But somehow forcing ads in front of videos on YouTube isn't the same exact thing? Both force an ad to be looked at before granting you access to the content you came for. I don't get the distinction.
- sokoloff 9y agoGoogle owns one of them, so there's that distinction...
- matt4077 9y agoHave you ever seen the little "x" in the corner of google display ads? If you click it, you're asked for the reason you're objecting to the ad. Among them "ad covers content". Meaning: you shouldn't always assume the worst, especially if there's evidence against it.
- Pxtl 9y agoAt least I don't have to play a hidden object adventure game to find the close button for YouTube ads.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoThis is only really because you're already aware of where YouTube's buttons are and how they work. If you visited any given other website often enough, it'd be more or less the same.
- naraniano 9y agoLike this one I get every now and then across all of their services? http://i.imgur.com/f5NS6GQ.png http://i.imgur.com/f5NS6GQ.png
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoI wouldn't call that an ad. Nor would I condemn Google occasionally reminding users to check their privacy settings. In fact, I encourage it.
- cm2187 9y agoThat's not google reminding you of privacy settings (in fact if you want to change those this menu is highly impractical with a lot of nesting). This is google making you agree with their T&C to go any further.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoIsn't that effectively a legal requirement? That users must make some sort of actual confirmation step to acknowledge the terms for them to be legally enforceable? I mean, look at my submission/comment history, I'm literally the voice of Google criticism on this website. But it's hard to see how this little diversion has to do with pop-up ads. It's not advertising, first and foremost.
- cm2187 9y ago
- hetfeld 9y agoOnce a year...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ccleary00 9y agoIf they can punish those Sumo Me fullscreen popups that ask for your email everytime you're 2 seconds into the page, that would be great.
- newusertoday 9y agoAny idea what would happen to chat boxes that pop up on companies websites? they don't block the content and are there to interact with customers (think olark). Does anyone know if that would lead to lower search ranking as well?
- zo1 9y agoNot as bad as Google punishing sites that host conservative/controversial authors and viewpoints: http://www.thelibertyconservative.com/google-issues-ultimatum-to-the-liberty-conservative-censor-your-content-or-lose-all-ad-revenue/ http://www.thelibertyconservative.com/google-issues-ultimatu...
- kutkloon7 9y agoWhile I hate ads, I also think google has way too much power already, and this is not a healthy development.
- Animats 9y agoDoes this mean they'll get rid of their own popup ad: Get to Google faster. Switch your default search engine to Google. Yes, show me. There's not even a "No" option. (Google is my default search engine. I just have their tracking blocked, so they can't check this. Lame.)
- Crontab 9y agoI am glad to see I am not the only one who gets this. I use IE at work and it is annoying. I have also noticed that Google's Captcha is more annoying than it is on Chrome.
- CamelCaseName 9y agoI hope this is not too off-topic, but what features are we missing out on in Chrome that are present in IE?
- saghm 9y agoGiven that GP specified that they used it at work, it's possible that they don't use it by choice.
- dangerlibrary 9y agoIt is too off-topic.
- kittiepryde 9y agoSome require older versions of ie for old plugins to still function.
- darkhorn 9y agohttps://html5test.com https://html5test.com http://css3test.com http://css3test.com
- PaulHoule 9y agoCompetition.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- girishso 9y agoWill they also punish those websites with "activate notifications" pop ups? I'm so tired of those and there seems no way of blocking, even after blocking notifications in Chrome settings.
- Larrikin 9y agoFirefox let's you permanently block a site from asking for the notification permission
- saosebastiao 9y agoThis is good. Also, can they punish sites that download 50MB of bullshit before showing a word on the page?
- chinathrow 9y agoThat is laughable. They push full screen pop-up ads within AdSense itself...
- amelius 9y agoIs this true? Afaik I've never seen full screen Google ads (or perhaps I have, but just didn't identify them as such).
- robtaylor 9y agoThey do and have said it would be a negative ranking factor. So yes, one google product can result in a penalty with another. You will probably make a few quid more on adsense though.
- robtaylor 9y agoThis was something from January (2017) and trailed in 2016. It also covers the adsense product - so using google product can affect your google rank. HOWEVER there are many many news websites that have not been penalised despite a full range of pop ups, interstitial and screen take over adverts. Anyone from Google able to explain why there is such a discrepancy?
- smegel 9y agoComing weeks after headless Chrome is released, wonder if there is a connection.
- borplk 9y agoNot sure what you mean. Google using Chrome headless for crawling? I'm sure their crawling infrastructure was already more than capable.
- DerfNet 9y agoI work for an e-commerce company. This absolutely brutalized our sales until we made significant changes to our layout. I understand that this instance is seen as a net positive for the end user, but Google should not have the power to force websites to conform to whatever Google decides is the new standard, or become irrelevant. The end user should be deciding what is and isn't worthwhile content, or where to shop, or what have you. Not Google.
- mythrwy 9y agoNot you either. If people come in through Google because they are searching for something and instead of arriving at the content that was advertised in search results, see a content covering popup, that's not really informed decision making. I think Google has legitimate right to rank sites that do this lower.
- weirdstuff 9y agoThat's more ok for a smaller outfit, but now that Google is abusing their monopolistic market position it's not as ok. Not to worry, the days of the U.S. government busting up monopolies seem behind us.
- taysic 9y agoIf users heard there were better results elsewhere though, they would switch from Google. However, it is more likely that by doing this Google prevents itself from being taken over by a competitor that creates this feature.
- vm 9y agoWhat kind of ecommerce company? I do a lot of work in the sector. Your business is dependent on Google for traffic. You can embrace it and be beholden to platform rules, or you can build a direct audience and brand. The latter is hard but more defensible and there are many case studies to follow of other companies doing this.
- golergka 9y ago
- siliconc0w 9y agoThis is great. Ideally you look at the % of the page with actual content and % of the page with 'everything else' and sort by % content. Hopefully, this would motivate sites to compete with one another for cleaner UX.
- z3t4 9y agoI wonder how they detect if something is annoying.
- QAPereo 9y agoIt doesn't matter, ad blocking is here to stay and expand, and it's a ticking clock on this nonsense. How many HN users ever see an ad at this point?
- shp0ngle 9y agoCan they please also punish sites that cover whole page with that stupid cookie warning, thanks.
- jacquesm 9y agoThe legally required one?
- jiggunjer 9y ago...that wouldn't even be necessary if they didn't try to mine the marrow out of you.
- cassowary 9y agoCould they just get around the requirement by using the HTML5 storage stuff? It's such a silly legal requirement. There's significant privacy concerns. And they make me close this silly message that has nothing to do with privacy at all.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zeep 9y agoHow can sites punish Google? I guess they could switch to non-popup ads that aren't powered by Google...
- kindawinda 9y agoi dont know why they always says this and never fulfill. search 'free porn' and youll see pornhub.com and xnxx.com and they have popups but never get deranked.
- ceejayoz 9y agoThey may well be penalizing those sites, but in the porn world, everyone's using those sorts of abusive ads, and being equally bumped down in rank.
- imgabe 9y agoHow about the sites with the obnoxious "sign up for our newsletter" pop over?
- kazinator 9y agoGoogle will take a shot at a 1990's problem that desktop browsers have done away so long ago, that people hardly remember? This seems rather analogous to digging up a corpse to give it a spiteful kick in the ribs and bury it again. Given all the SEO spam in the Google search index, it is a misplaced priority to make a target out of sites with popups.
- dredmorbius 9y ago2016 story FYI.