You don’t expect to be interrupted when you’re online particularly when you’ve got a page you want to visit. But suddenly you are and with a degree of frustration, you find you’ve got to rev up your savvy and rapidly navigate to get behind the ad’s scenes before you’re inundated. Ads have become our enemy number one uninvited interruption and are designed to momentarily block our access to our destination.
Google has lost patience with eager offenders
Now just before you put a rigid finger through your phone, Google who was poised to do exactly that, now has the perpetrator covered. That is Google has lost patience with eager offenders who insist on front row seats every time you open your phone. Advertisers had their moment of glory when they slipped under the radar but the day of reckoning has arrived and Google is now targeting them with tactics that only a supreme authority can reinforce. And there are going to be a bunch of very annoyed so and so’s when their efforts to distort a page with their announcements are abruptly dismissed before you can interact with the rest of their site.
Google, who have had it up to here, will not hesitate to throw a spanner at those ads that pop up on page load or cleverly appear as an overlay that greys out the content beneath them to prevent you from reading a website. They’re as irritated as you’ve become and they’ve realised patience is expensive. So are mobile phones! Especially when that little ‘x’, cleverly peeking from a tiny right hand corner is so diminutive, it is easy to unintentionally tap on the ad and go hurtling into another world on a completely alien page. That is exactly what the ad was designed to do in the first place. Mission accomplished, but patience can only be spent once.
Problems caused by ad banners
Given the tiny floaters; those little banners that appear on the bottom of your phone’s screen are almost microscopic, Google isn’t fretting about them too much and they’re not concerned about legal pop-ups that are used for letting you know that the website uses cookies. That’s a lawful interruption to be noted and more of us seem to accept those messages.
Google has a responsibility to keep the wheels well oiled particularly when it comes to ads and they take that responsibility seriously. But ads must exist on this two way street although happily, the rules certainly matured as the internet grew wiser.
In the early days, there were unethical SEO “cyber-terrorists” who thought they could dominate the Google rankings. Even when the terms they used had absolutely nothing to do with what they were selling they became complacent. They were caught and unceremoniously ousted as Google continued to search for other methods to make a clean experience for everyone involved. They remain globally fair and have simplified the SEO process.
Beware of ad stuffing
Now Google makes no bones about it’s intention to penalise those who are intent on stuffing ads in our faces. Everyone has a reason to connect to the internet and the last thing they need is to be inundated with unexpected, uninvited, irrelevant ‘Look at Me!’ ads that do nothing but drain the oil from the wheels in motion.
Nobody likes an ad in their face and very few enjoy a pop-up. Google listened and has warned would be pop-up gurus and advertising engineers who use these annoying tactics to up their own ante, that they will find themselves ranked lower than low. However, if a site provides paramount information on a topic, it is likely to remain first on the rank; it still benefits other sites who want to get at least a foot in the ranking door. These changes have been ominous and complacency will not pay in the long run. Google always wins so it is best to heed that changes need to be made.
If you’re one who is reliant on pop-ups, sneaky, microscopic ‘x’s that can be barely seen and relentless, annoying ads, you might just find yourself ousted from the ‘Mobile Friendly’ websites that are being buoyed by search ranking. That search ranking is your major source of visitors and those tiny little ‘x’ s in the corner … they count for nothing. Very clearly, Google has opened the doors to the ranking basement for websites who insist on employing those little offenders. It is your choice; whatever you do, traffic is as enthusiastic about your site as you are.