Vol. 62: Three New ESEO Team Members; Google Penalizes Pages with Intrusive Mobile Interstitials

Eminent SEO News: 3 New Hires

As the Eminent SEO client base expands, our team does as well. Over the last month, we have added three new members to the Eminent SEO team, and we’re looking to hire more!

Meet the three newest members of our team:

What’s New in SEO: Google Targets Intrusive Mobile Interstitials

Have you ever clicked a link on social media or in Google Search and you were served a full-page pop-up that you had to click out of to see the desired content? If you hate when that happens, you’re not alone.

Just last week, two high-ranking members of Google confirmed their company began targeting websites that use so-called intrusive mobile interstitials before serving the content that actually shows up in the search engine results. Basically, Google has started penalizing pages that are interrupted by an interstitial right out of mobile search. A penalty will either put the page out of Google’s radar or push it way down in the mobile search results.

Google officials, however, said that the penalty does not apply to pages the user could click through to after landing on a certain page from search. In other words, if you open a website from Google Search and an intrusive interstitial only pops up after clicking to another page on that website, then the site won’t suffer any penalties.

Here are some other instances where certain interstitials won’t warrant a Google penalty for a website:

• When the interstitial is for legal obligations, such as to verify the user’s age or warn them about cookies
• If the interstitial pops up ahead of non-indexible content that is behind a paywall
• When a pop-up banner only covers a small portion of the screen and is easily dismissible

But Who Uses Intrusive Interstitials?

An obvious example that comes to mind of a website with intrusive interstitials is Forbes.com. Whether you’re going to the homepage or you’re clicking on a specific Forbes article from social media or search, you’re immediately served a “Quote of the Day” full page before arriving at your desired reading content. This is true whether visiting Forbes from your mobile device or desktop.

While the Forbes interstitial is fairly benign and it still takes you to your desired page after 5 seconds (unless you manually click out of it), it’s still quite frustrating if you’re trying to pull up an article quickly. The “Quote of the Day” page isn’t an ad by itself, but as you can see, they sneak an ad in there while you’re waiting for the article to appear, which is more prominent on mobile.

The Forbes site has been doing this for several years, but its web content team might want to put an end to it, based on Google’s recent targeting of this practice. Then again, Forbes is a news website and may not care all that much about organic search engine rankings, so it’s anybody’s guess as to whether they’ll kill off the “Quote of the Day” interstitials.

For those of you who do care about your organic rankings, the lesson here is to get rid of intrusive mobile interstitials that cover most, or all, of certain pages on your website. You’re especially going to want to do this if the pages in question show up high in Google mobile search. To read more about Google’s new penalty rollout, check out Search Engine Land’s report.

December Social Media Roundup

We had a busy, but rewarding holiday season here at Eminent SEO. How were your holidays? As the month progressed, we again saw strong engagement on our Instagram account. See the best of our social media shares from last month:

December Blog Roundup

On the Eminent SEO blog in December, we covered a pair of social media-related topics. One dealt with social media directly – copywriting for social media – while the other has very close ties – GIF images. So if you want to upgrade your social game, read through the following blog posts very carefully. Below is an overview of those two posts.

Why Well-Written Social Media Copy Makes a Difference

While the average social media manager doesn’t have to be a writer, per se, it is still imperative to write strongly on any social platform. Learn why strong social media copy makes a difference, and get a few tips on how to write specifically for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

GIF Images Are Clever Tools in the Right Marketer’s Hands

Animated GIFs are the life of any social media thread, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. Are you familiar with the five different types of GIFs? You’ll learn all about that plus the legal considerations of sharing GIFs when you read this insightful blog post.

Quality over Quantity Marketing

Now more than ever, Eminent SEO is a firm believer in (and practitioner of) quality over quantity when it comes to digital marketing solutions. That’s why we refer to ourselves as a boutique marketing agency.

It’s easy to see that one great blog post can do more for a website and a brand than several mediocre posts. Likewise, one viral social media share can pay more dividends than dozens of run-of-the-mill social posts. This is why when we look over a client’s objectives for the month, we don’t think in terms of, for example, how many blog posts they need, but instead we ask, “How can we produce remarkable content that knocks it out of the park for them?”

In short, we focus on quality over quantity because readers now demand it, and because that’s what it takes to excel in today’s SEO environment. Anything less would be uncivilized.

To learn more about our unique approach to marketing and how we can help your business, call us today at 800.871.4130.

Happy New Year!

Team Eminent SEO

Eminent SEO provides strategic SEO campaigns with measurable results along with expert website design, development, pay per click, content and social media and organic website marketing. 800.871.4130.

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