We have all been there, opening a website on our phones and suddenly a pop up appears. We try to close it but our fat fingers are too fat to hit the CLOSE button that seems to be the size of an ant. Well, Google to the rescue! Google will soon start punishing websites who use this practice by hurting their SEO rankings. This is good news for users which is Google’s top priority. For website owners who are making a killing on those ads because most of the time people end up clicking the ad when trying to click the close button, not so good.
This all ties back to what good marketers practice and try to tell their clients and peers; make a good user experience your top priority. Google has been preaching, practicing and enforcing this for years now. When it comes to SEO especially, trying tricks to improve your ranking or get more clicks is never going to last long with Google. Whether it is stuffing keywords at the bottom of your page, stuffing keywords in your content when it is not organic making it hard to read or buying links to increase the inbound links to your website. Google will figure out how to detect it and will punish your website for it.
You can read more about this issue on Google’s official blog announcement:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html
