Pages with App Interstitials Will Lose Mobile Friendly Boost Sunday

Just a reminder if you have been waiting for the last minute before removing full page app interstitials from their webpages, pages will lost that mobile friendly tag in the search results and associated mobile friendly ranking boost on Sunday, November 1st.

Google announced at the beginning of September that serving full page app interstitials to users when they click through from the Google search results would lose their mobile friendly tag and boost, giving website owners 2 months to switch their pages over.  But they had been hinting and warning about this for months before their official announcement.

This only affects full page app interstitials, and only when they are displayed when a user clicks through from the Google search results.  Other types of interstitials, such as the Forbes interstitials, are unfortunately excluded from this.

Google recommends that website owners display an app banner instead of the full page app interstitial.  App banners are fine, and pages with app banners do get the mobile friendly tag and boost, as long as there are not any other mobile problems on those pages.

Also, remember if you delayed removing those full page app interstitials until the last minute, Google will need to recrawl those pages again before it can reapply the mobile friendly tag and boost.  If those app interstitials were present in the most recent crawl of each page on November 1st, they will lose the boost.  So you should expect to see a lag before you get that mobile friendliness back again.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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