Interstitial Penalty?

[AMHC]

We have an ecommerce website, and we show a popup for first time visitors to our desktop site to join our email list. Google has cached pages with the popup.

Can I assume that this is a problem?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Why do you think it would be a problem? I assume you want users to see that popup, as well as you don't want to hide anything from google. So, as long as everything is clear both to search engines and users, I don't think there is a problem.

[MarieHaynes]

At this point the interstitial "penalty" only affects mobile sites that show a full screen interstitial to readers. It's not really a penalty, but rather, what Google says is that it can cause a site to lose its "mobile friendly" label which could result in a reduction of rankings.

What you are doing is pretty common and wouldn't result in a penalty. However, if it is really annoying to users and causes a lot of people to immediately click away and go back to the Google results then this could possibly negatively impact rankings. This would be a good case for A/B testing to see if you get significantly better user engagement when they don't see the popup. If so, then that's a sign that the popup is too intrusive.