Why would a search engine care whether or not your website has pop-ups? Yet, they do and when they find them they give them a low ranking because of the quality issues attached to them.

What is a pop-up?

Certain types of downloadable content can cause pop-ups, especially images and free music for instance. Sometime they may look like an normal web page though. Pop-ups are used by websites to display information without disturbing the page currently open. Some may however result in the page being reloaded and this can cause loss of information for the user. Some may be used to install software and clicking on some may cause others to open

The methodology behind pop-ups

Pop-up advertisements are annoying. They were popular a few years ago but today they are just a nuisance and amazingly difficult to get rid of if you don’t know what to do, even though it is reported that it is easy to block them. The question is whether they have a negative affect on search engine rankings.

There is enough information doing the rounds to suggest that Google are against them. They are more likely to favour a website which is clean and which has no pop-ups as opposed to one which automatically forces pop-ups.

There is evidence to support this

The Google toolbar has it’s own built in pop-up blocker and they disapprove of AdWord landing pages which contain pop-up pages. Google is all about quality and if a web page has great content but is surrounded by a lot of advertisement, focus is going to be diverted away from the actual copy, or content. If a pop-up window rears its head on a web page, Google are apt to be aware of this and this will most likely cause them to impact this has on visitors to the page. The relevancy of the pop-up advertisement though may have a strong influence over whether this is considered negative or not.

The speed in which landing page opens is an important factor in SEO as well as in Goggle Adwords. Having large pop-ups may slow the loading time down and this is a definite factor to consider.

It can only be assumed however that Google take the same stance toward organic rankings and if so, how large this factor contributes toward affecting SEO in a negative way.

Additional information

What information is available regarding the influence they have on rankings is limited to opinions posted forums, mostly. All seem to agree that it is safe to avoid pop-up windows whenever possible. There are still many questions unanswered though, questions such as ‘are all types of pop-ups treated equally’ for instance. Are hyperlink pop-ups alright because they are triggered by an action by a user instead of being forced and are exit traffic pop-ups different from the perspective of SEO?

SEO web design and pop-ups are linked and are still widely used which is possibly one of the reasons why SEO has become such an important part of web designing.

SEO will continue to fix the problems they have created until designers learn separate content from context. So, not only do pop-ups affect rankings, so does poor web design. SEO = usability and pop-ups are not useable, in fact they interfere with online search activities.

Ways to block Pop-ups is actively pursued, but advertisers are always looking for ways to circumvent these restrictions.

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