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Search Engine Journal reports that, according to John Mueller, Mobile sites can display pop-ups on a temporary basis without getting penalized in search results.
Google's John Mueller says sites can display pop-ups without being penalized, but the pop-ups have to be temporary. Since penalties got introduced back in 2016, Google has advised against showing pop-ups to mobile visitors, under the threat of having your pages devalued in search. However, now it seems it's safe to display pop-ups on mobile, all be it for a limited time. Mueller says pop-ups are no longer a priority for Google's web spam team. During a Google Search Central office hours stream on January 22, one site owner asked about using mobile pop-ups to capture leads by drawing attention to a survey. Mueller had this to say in reply:
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"I don't think we would penalize a website for anything like this. The web spam team has other things to do than to penalize a website for having a pop-up. There are two aspects that could come into play. On one hand we have, on mobile, the policy of the intrusive interstitials, so that might be something to watch out for that you don't keep it too long or show it to everyone all the time. With that policy it's more of a subtle ranking factor that we use to adjust the ranking slightly if we see that there's no useful content on the page when we load it. That's something that could come into play, but it's more something that would be a temporary thing. If you have this survey on your site for a week or so, then during that time we might pick up on that signal, we might respond to that signal, and then if you have removed it we can essentially move on as well. So it's not that there's going to be a lasting effect there."
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Mueller also said it's not okay to replace proper content with pop-ups, essentially because Google will index the pop-up content, and that won't be great for your ranking:
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"Another aspect that you want to watch out for is if you're showing the pop-up instead of your normal content, then we will index the content of the pop-up. If you're showing the pop-up in addition to the existing content, which sounds like the case, then we would still have the existing content to index and that would kind of be okay."
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