Google sends notices about intrusive interstitials to sites that annoyingly place them on their websites. The subject lines of the emails read:
“Improve your page experience by removing intrusive interstitials from domain goes here.”
We have not yet seen a screenshot of the notice, so it is difficult to determine if this is a Google-mandated action or a friendly reminder. We don’t see any intrusive interstitials on the manual actions list. Although we know that there is an algorithmic page experience update, even for desktop pages, Google doesn’t send email via Google Search Console to address algorithmic issues. They email manual actions and not algorithms.
We found a thread at Google Webmaster Help that one person wrote. The message was received as
I received an email titled “Improve page experience by removing intrusive Interstitials from Mtckitchen.com.” I have a popup sign-up page, and I wonder if there is a way to make the form visible to our audience but not intrusive. I’d love to hear your ideas! We are grateful.
David Iwanow also shared on Twitter that last week he had spotted one:
Google has a comprehensive help document that addresses this topic. It explains that “intrusive dialogs and interstitials” are elements on pages that obscure users’ views of content. This is usually done for promotional purposes. Interstitials can be overlaid across the entire page, while dialogs are overlays that only cover a portion of the page. Sometimes, they also obscure the underlying content. “
Google has added the following,
“Intrusive dialogues and interstitials can make it difficult for Google and other search engine to understand your content. This may lead to poor search results.” Users who find your website difficult to use will not revisit it, even through search engines. “
Maybe it’s not a manual step but a warning from Google that we have trouble understanding your content.
Did you see this notice recently?
This is a screenshot of
