As you know, the Google mobile interstitial penalty began to roll out on schedule on January 10, 2017. Some, but very few sites, got hit hard pretty quickly but truth is, very few are noticing that sites with intrusive mobile interstitials are getting hurt.
It might be because it is not fully rolled out yet but I am not sure.
As Glenn Gabe pointed out on Twitter, Google crawled and cached a page with an intrusive mobile interstitials after January 10th and it still ranks just fine:
Regarding needing a fresh crawl to see impact from the mobile popup algorithm, many of the urls I'm checking have been crawled after 1/10/17 pic.twitter.com/qaWRc2rUWK
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 18, 2017
Folks at the WebmasterWorld forums are also asking, where is the penalty. Here are some comments from that thread:
This seems to be a very low-impact update. Despite the majority of the site already being re-crawled since the date, one of my large sites with a giant interstitial ad didn't budge one bit.
I know one of our smaller properties took a big dip over the past week, but traffic is still good.I've heard unconfirmed reports of people losing 80%+ traffic, removed their interstitials and traffic popped back up the next day.
There are several prominent news sites I've been watching with noticeable interstitials. One appears to have dropped the overlay... the other hasn't. It will be interesting to see if they get hit. IMO, they've deserved to get hit for a while now.
Glenn Gabe is tracking around 60 sites and he said, he has seen very few get hit. In fact, he said this penalty "has no teeth."
@rustybrick No changes. Went through my list of sites using mobile popups again this morning. As of now, the algo has no teeth.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 19, 2017
The concern is, without having enough of a negative impact - publishers will not remove or add back their intrusive mobile interstitials and it is like nothing happened.
Personally, I think Google is tweaking it and we have yet to see the true impact of this penalty but I have zero inside information.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
