Deepcrawl is now Lumar. Read more.
DeepcrawlはLumarになりました。 詳細はこちら

Interstitial Pop-ups

Interstitials are pop-up content which will appear once a website has loaded for users. While these can be useful, they may also cause long-term UX issues as well as affect how search engines are able to crawl a website.

Within our SEO Office Hours recaps below, we cover SEO and website health best practices for these pop-ups and compile Google’s own recommendations for implementing interstitial popups on your website from an organic search perspective.

Legal and age-verification interstitials can affect crawling

Interstitials (for example, those that require users to verify their age before browsing) can have a negative impact on crawling and indexing if not implemented properly. Googlebot doesn’t click buttons or fill in forms, so any interstitial that requires those actions before the page is loaded may prevent Googlebot from crawling the content itself. Ideally, it’s recommended to use JS/CSS to display interstitials on top of existing content that’s already been loaded in. Because the content is still being loaded and users can access it after navigating the interstitial, this would not be seen as cloaking.

13 May 2022

Google Differentiates Between Legal & Advertising Interstitials

Google will generally try to recognise legal interstitials and banners in order to differentiate them from advertising banners. This is to done to prevent them from causing problems when Google crawls the site. The only time this may become an issue is when the interstitial replaces the content on the page and prevents it from being crawled.

15 Nov 2019

Check For Interstitials With Google’s Mobile-friendly Test

Interstitials may seem like a quick win for sites, but they cause long-term UX issues. Check your site for interstitials with Google’s Mobile-Friendly testing tool.

22 Feb 2019

Use Flexible Sampling or First Click Free to Allow Google to Crawl Content Behind Paywall

For pages with a single sign-on interstitial or behind a paywall, John recommends implementing flexible sampling or a first-click free approach so that Googlebot can crawl these pages.

14 Dec 2018

Legal Interstitials Which Redirect Users May Block Google

If you have a legal interstitial, such as an age gate, which redirect a user to a different page and set a cookie, Google will not be able to crawl and index the content. You can use an HTML div overlayed on the page, or use JavaScript to load the interstitial so Google can still see the normal content in the HTML. If you need to redirect a user to a different page, then you could create a different page with content which doesn’t need the legal approval.

30 Nov 2018

Googlebot Can’t Index Content on a Page With an Interstitial

Googlebot can’t get past interstitials to the content beyond by clicking any links or the close button, and will try to index the content of the interstitial instead. John recommends serving an intestitial overlay using JavaScript so your content can still be accessed.

15 May 2018

Page Layout is Only an SEO Issue for Mobile-Friendly Testing

Page layout is only really an issue for SEO when it comes to mobile-friendly testing and the mobile interstitial update.

6 Mar 2018

Pages That Redirect to Interstitials Are Dropped from the Index

Make sure pages don’t redirect to interstitials and that they’re kept on the same URL or Googlebot could drop these pages from the index.

12 Dec 2017

Mobile Interstitial Penalty Doesn’t Impact Brand Searches

The mobile interstitial penalty doesn’t have any impact on desktop results, and won’t impact brand searches. Using banners within the page are a better option than pop-ups which prevent any content being seen by users.

30 May 2017

Interstitials Blocked with Robots.txt Might be Seen as Cloaking

You can prevent Google from seeing a JavaScript run interstitial by blocking the JavaScript with robots.txt, but Google doesn’t recommend it as it might be seen as cloaking.

16 May 2017

Back 1/2 Next