The new change Google is making to remove the mobile friendly tag and mobile ranking boost to webpages that show users an app interstitial – or app install box that covers most of the screen – does not impact other types of pop-ups or interstitials… at least not yet.

This change is specific to those pages that serve the app install banners when people initially click through to the webpage from the Google search results.  It won’t have any impact on those who serve an interstitial after the first click, nor on interstitials that are served for reasons outside of pushing an app install.

John Mueller clarified that this is for app installs only.  Those websites that feature popups for things like cookie usage will not be affected.

The question came up specific to cookie and/or privacy warnings that many people have been adding to their sites.

This is specific to app-install interstitials that  hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page. I haven’t seen any cookie banners like that. ?

So to be safe, ensure that your cookie or privacy warnings do not cover most of the content on the page, and you haven’t added an app install button to them for any reason.  But as long as they are smaller in size, they won’t be impacted at all by this new change.  And if you have the desire to serve up some interstitials, do it on the second click, not the initial one that brings users to your site from the Google search results.

That said, don’t be surprised if Google expands this to other kinds of pop-ups and interstitials in the future.