We’re working hard on our upcoming Yoast SEO 3.0 release. Multiple focus keywords is slowly proving itself to me as probably the best thing we’ve ever made. It wasn’t the hottest week in search, which is probably a good thing as we’ve had plenty of those recently, but still there’s some stuff to report, ranging from app interstitials to some news about search result snippets.

App interstitial “penalty” now live

Google had warned us about this and I’ve written about this before, but it’s now live. In Google’s own words (and bolding):

Starting today, pages with an app install interstitial that hide a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page won’t be considered mobile-friendly.

Not the most surprising change of the world, what surprises me is that they specifically penalize app interstitials and don’t seem to penalize newsletter popups as much… I’m no fan of any popup, even though admittedly even for us they work quite well. We only show a popup on “exit intent” though, so when you move your mouse towards one of the top corners of the screen. I’m guessing those will be OK for quite a while longer in Google’s eyes.

Optimize your YouTube videos

If you didn’t have reason enough just yet, there’s now one more reason to optimize your YouTube videos. Google has started showing featured snippets taken from the content of video transcripts. Your own site might take quite a while longer to get those, so using YouTube as an intermediate step might be a good idea here.

Ridiculously long snippets

Google ran a test this week that made quite a few of us question the sanity of some of their engineers. They tested a 7 line snippet. That’s a bit like… Yuck! When I tried to reproduce it I “only” got a 4 line description snippet and even that I’ve always thought is ridiculous.

Don’t hide content in JavaScript arrays

Another post from the SEM Post (they’re doing some awesome reporting), highlights a tweet from Gary Ilyes of Google about not hiding content in JavaScript arrays. It might be indexed, but it also might not be indexed. Rule of thumb: if you think a specific bit of content is useful to users: show it. If you think it’s OK to hide it by default, why do you have it in the first place?

That’s it, see you next week!