One of the user experience killers that every marketers and SEO practitioners need to avoid is interstitials. Interstitial is a type of emerging ad format that is being displayed before users can continue to the information they are looking for on that page.

The interstitials are typically designed to pitch exactly at the transition point in the flow towards the information so that it can get the high click through rate (CTR) with or without the user interest. So it has been considered as the form of interruption marketing and should be avoided to improve user metrics.

According to the google guidelines and SEO practice history, the common goal of any marketing should be facilitating the user with the information they search for without disrupting the user experience. On the basis of that, Google has explained different types of interstitials that would be the cause of penalty in near future, including;

• Popup ads/images immediately after user landed on the pages coming from any channels
• Standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before continuing to the main content
• Application of interstitial on the above the fold portion of the page

However as Google always focus on user experience and correlated metrics to improve user behavior on the pages, the natural and organic approach of interstitials are still safe, including;

• Interstitial pop-up for cookie usage
• Standalone interstitial for age verification that is natural for the niche domain
• Application of interstitial banner that users a reasonable amount of screen space without over-pitching and scope to avoid it

Considering all the scopes and limitations discussed above, it is highly recommended to identify and follow the user trend and different metrics along with the application of interstitials as the overall performance of the website including ranking is highly correlated with user metrics and facilitating the user without any disruption in organic way should be the top priority of any marketing campaigns.

Happy Marketing 🙂

The organic sitelinks are the additional hyperlinks to the website subpages that appears under the Google search results listing. The sitelinks are the organic results by google itself through automated algorithm. According to the Google patents, sitelinks are derived from the user metrics, in particular, the number of times a page is visited, the amount spent on the page, bounce rate, content relevancy and other user behavior for that page.

The idea of the sitelinks extension are to make user-friendly result and helps users to navigate the site to the most popular and related pages or links within the website listed.

Basically, sitelinks appear when the site is ranked on the first position on the first page of the SEPRs and it is also said to appear on some search results where google thinks one result is far more relevant that other results like navigational or brand related search queries.

According to the google search console help,

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future. There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site’s internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that’s informative, relevant, compact, and avoids repetition and overstuffing.

How to improve your organic sitelinks extension?

• Get a unique brand name and optimize to rank for the first position
• Identify more keywords opportunities to rank on the first position on SERPs
• Organize pages and relevant content through the easy navigation structure
• Optimize pages with unique and informative title tag and meta description.
• Focus optimizing your site for the users rather than robots.
• Find more opportunities through data analysis to promote and strategize so that more sitelinks appears on the search engine results page

The sandbox effect also known as aging delay in search engine optimization, is a hypothetical belief in SEO market that Google has a filter that places all new website under restriction for a certain amount of time to limit them from ranking their keywords in search results.

The main idea behind google sandbox is that google takes some time to consider all the technical aspects of the website, relevancy, consistency and search engine ranking signals to consider for ranking. When the Google is sure of all the aspects of ranking signals, then it will acknowledge the respective keywords for ranking.

Officially google didn’t confirm or deny the existence of the sandbox effect or amount of time it processed. However, as the behaviors of keywords in search analytics, the sandbox effect can be noticed for keywords in terms of ranking.

A reverse sandbox effect is also claimed to exist where new pages with unique content and keywords with less competition can rank in google in early phases. Can happen when the content is viral to reach to a large audience, more interaction and other user metrics that google consider for ranking.

As being a SEO practitioner since 2009, I would like to go for natural methodologies of SEO process for keyword ranking in google. Despite , considering unofficial google sandbox effect seriously, I would like to suggest to keep focus on your site for online reputation, growing traffic from various sources, relevant content development, maintain relationship with your users, optimizing for user metrics, using white hat techniques for ranking and working consistently with your SEO tasks considering all search engine guidelines and google updates so far.

If you are planning to grow your online business organically and naturally in a search engine and looking to identify more scope from your current website status, feel free to write to me at writetohemanta@gmail.com for free SEO audit report and consultation session. I would love to have an opportunity to discuss with you about your project.