Google’s Mobile Interstitial Demotion Updates When Page Recrawled

Google launched their mobile interstitial and popup demotion earlier this month which would see sites with interstitials and obtrusive popups receive a demotion in the mobile search results.  If you need to remove them, the demotion in the search results will not be removed until after Googlebot has crawled each individual page again.

The question came up in yesterday’s webmaster office hours, whether the demotion would be removed in real time, or if it was only updating once in a while, meaning a site owner would need to wait for the demotion to be lifted.

John Mueller confirmed that it is “real time.”

It is updated when we recrawl and reindex the pages.

He did include the caveat that it can take some time depending on how frequently Google indexes those pages.

It’s hard to say because it really depends on how often we recrawl those pages, so for most sites, some pages will recrawl every couple of days and other pages we will recrawl every couple of months.  So that is something where there’s flexible area.

This makes it act the same as how the original mobile friendly ranking boost worked, which would update it when Google crawled the page again.

The same would also apply for those sites that are adding them back to their mobile sites, the demotion would not be applied until Google recrawls each page and sees the interstitial or popup.

If your site has mobile interstitials or popups on it, you will need to wait for Google to recrawl each individual page before the demotion will be removed.   You can submit individual pages or individual pages and the links in Google’s Fetch and Submit tool in Search Console, if you want to get a jump start on the recrawl.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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