Prevent Google Web Preview bot from seeing pop-up,m bad for SEO?

[Webprint]

Hey guys,

On our website, we have a lightbox pop-up showing an external page with an e-mail newsletter signup form. It it shown to some 5% of our visitors and works with a cookie to prevent the popup from showing at each visit.

Recently, I saw the popup displayed in the Google SERP instant preview, for every page. The preview looks messed up. We could prevent the popup to be shown to the google web preview bot by blocking this user agent.

Question is: Will it hurt our SEO? Because we show the web preview bot (not the crawl bot) something different than what a visitor may see

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[Andropenis_Australia]

Probably, yes.

Any restriction you place on the google bot can be seen as sneaky, something like a pop up in instant preview I would not worry too much about, honestly, how much do you use it when you are looking for info or a site?