The World Wide Web turned 25 years old on Tuesday and since almost the beginning we have been inundated with many types of obtrusive marketing pop ups, unders, drop downs and more.

On the same day as the web’s anniversary, the megalord decider of the modern internet – Google – made an announcement on their Webmasters Blog outlining they will begin to punish websites that contain obtrusive popups starting January 17, 2017.

Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.

This is what I think will happen to marketing popups:

via GIPHY

While there might still be a time and place for popups in the future, this announcement from Google will likely kill the practice. Probably for a good reason.

That doesn’t mean you can’t use them.

As long as they are on pages that don’t require being indexed in search.

Related Reads:

Google Webmasters Blog

WP Tavern Recap