Google has recently announced two large changes regarding its mobile search results. The main one everyone will likely notice first is the removal of the “mobile-friendly” label that accompanies pages in search results, that are in fact.. mobile friendly.

You may ask the question why? Why is Google doing this? Well.. according to their own data, approximately 85% of all pages that show on Google’s mobile search results are now essentially mobile-friendly. So to therefore clean up the results pages, they’re removing the label. But, it will continue to be used as a ‘ranking consideration’ per se. So your site definitely still needs to be mobile friendly.. and if you don’t have a mobile friendly site – contact us!

Now, moving into the future, the second change Google has made could have more impact overall. Beginning from January 10, 2017, Google is going to start ‘punishing’ mobile pages that pop-up those annoying.. well.. pop-ups, when you first open the page. The punishment is essentially a lower rank in Google search results. Not great for any website.

Average web designers, and online marketers are going to hate this news – however it cant come early enough for those mobile internet users who can’t standing trying to exit out of those annoying pop-ups with difficulty! Here at Futr, we’ll make certain never to build annoying pop-ups into our websites.. and now there’s all the more reason not to!

It is worth pointing out that Google won’t punish all sites that uses pop-ups as a whole — only the ones that make content less accessible when viewing the website. So to clarify, pop-ups that cover the majority of content once visitors land on your site, or as they’re looking through your site on their mobile device, as well as standalone pop-ups that need to be exited out of before accessing the actual website (especially frustrating), will be punished.

Some popups, like login windows, terms and conditions-type requirements etc will continue to be allowed and not punished by Google’s algorithms.

This definitely isn’t the beginning of the pop-up war from Google’s end – they already punish sites that use them for application install advertisements.

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