Posted by on June 9th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Uncategorized |
Do you remember the occasions when you were just reading something on the Internet peacefully when all of a sudden a browser containing an ad of some gambling site just flashed in front of your face, blocking your view from the interesting content you were looking at? You tried to close it, but all of a sudden another browser opens up. It seemed like the website was trying to squeeze the patience out of you, so you decided to close everything.
Do you remember the time when you unknowingly clicked a link to a website you want to check out and patiently waited for the page to load when you realized it was taking a bit long to appear? And adding to your annoyance, an ad banner of a dating site comes out of nowhere? Maybe you told yourself, “Hey, this is NOT what I am looking for!” and searched for another related website that had no annoying pop-ups.
Does anyone miss the dismal age of pop-ups? Nobody does. Nobody wanted their browsing experience be spoiled by a flood of advertisements that they weren’t even interested in. More often than not, users close the pop-ups the moment they appear.
Clearly, pop-ups used to be the mainstream of online marketing, but users didn’t like it. When most Internet users think of pop-ups, they think of the irritating ad that comes out of nowhere, making the web experience more inconvenient and annoying. Moreover, pop-ups can create trouble not only to users, but also to the websites, their owners, and their search engine optimization efforts.
Bad for the User
Pop-ups are used to display information or advertise products and/or services. At times, they may look like browsers of normal web pages and can cause confusion to the users. A pop-up may not be even related to the site itself, thus annoying the user with its irrelevance to the site and its obstruction to the browsing experience. People tend to close the pop-up down, or worse, close the websites by mistake because the pop-up looks like a regular browser. More often than not, people would click away from your site and never come back because the website confused them or the site did not give the necessary content that users expected from the site and needed immediately.
Some pop-ups appear as a result in the site being reloaded, causing loss of information for the users. Some appear to install software and clicking on some may also cause additional windows to open. On some occasions, pop-ups have victimized users to the extent that a pop-up keeps on appearing or regenerating even after it was closed, or it just stays in front of the browser unless the pop-up is closed manually.
Pop-ups have become a source of Internet hostility and are a major turnoff for users. People may develop resentment and mistrust towards websites that abuse pop-ups as they utterly spoil the browsing and learning experiences.
Bad for the Website
Pop-ups have become a mainstay of the Internet’s dark side. Statistically, pop-ups have been 50% more noticeable than regular ad banners, according to a Statistical Research Report. However, it has also been proven that pop-ups have been 100% more likely to be seen as disruptive and unhelpful. Simply, pop-ups make you more effective in advertising a product or service, but it also makes you TWICE more annoying than ad banners, thus hurting the reputation of your website and driving away MORE visitors in the long run.
Pop-ups do more harm than good as they create more obstacles between your viewers and your pages, leading to less traffic conversions. A clear indication of this is the emergence of more pop-up blockers, such as the Google Toolbar pop-up blocker, that prevent pop-ups from being displayed on your screen. They are now widely available for anyone to download for free. With the widespread use of pop-ups, pop-up repulsion has clearly developed overtime amongst users. This in turn has paved the way for a growing number of pop-up countermeasures users can freely utilize.
Moreover, a growing number of assisted technologies, such as screen reading software that allow blind computer users to access information despite their disabilities by reading aloud what is on the computer screen, do not support pop-ups. Thus, it leaves these potential users incapable to enter your site. Lastly, having pop-ups on your site can decrease the loading speed of your pages, irritating your users and driving them away to look for other websites to get the information they need faster.
Bad for SEO
From an SEO perspective, using pop-ups on your pages can create SEO problems and can be a clear disadvantage for your site. As pointed out earlier, there are pop-up blockers that have been developed to prevent pop-ups from appearing on the screen. This is more evident especially with Google’s own toolbar with a built-in pop-up blocker. This in itself can already harm your rankings for selected keywords in search engines, especially in Google’s. Google has been clear with its message that its search engine only indexes and serves high quality pages to its users at the fastest possible time. Even if a page has remarkable content but is bombarded with many pop-up ads, Google wouldn’t bother dealing with the content. Google is strict with quality and they don’t want Adword landing pages that contain pop-ups. They always prefer clean and pop-up-free websites to index.
Also, as mentioned earlier, pop-ups slow down the loading time of your web pages. Remember that your loading speed is a major factor that determines the overall site experience and rankings of your pages in search engines. The slower the loading time of your page due to pop-ups or poor server speed, the greater the damage done to your search rankings.
If your page loads too slowly, users would leave your site. Additionally, if your site takes much longer to respond to search engine crawlers, you might face the risk of your site not getting indexed. Search engines such as Google’s would always make sure that high quality pages deserve high rankings. And a page that has poor page quality carrying a high bounce back rate due to heavy pop-up activity gets much poorer search rankings.
Not Worth It
Let’s face it: using pop-ups is just not worth it. Indeed, it would make your site more noticeable, but for the WRONG reasons. It would not only annoy your users and drive them away from your site in the long run; you are damaging the overall browsing experience of your users and the reputation of your site. And ultimately, things will backfire; you thought that throwing so many ads on the face of your viewers will make you more popular or will reap you greater profits. But the truth is, users would not only condemn you for the annoyance and inconvenience you brought to them, the big fish of the online world like Google would ensure you get mark downs in rankings and visibility.
