Possible SEO Hit

[decoy31]

At the company I work for, SEO is a big deal. Google searches, for instance, bring in a large portion of the company's site traffic. That being said, Google penalizes sites who show full screen interstitials, especially on mobile screens. Also, on mobile, it's hard for a user to tell they've landed on the page they were expecting because the modal is full screen.

Has there been thought given to:

1. Showing the modal on the second page visit?
2. Showing a smaller, banner type interstitial?
3. Not showing the modal to bots?

[mikemorris]

1. Second visit would not be ideal for maximizing impact.
2. Smaller banner was an option we considered but ran out of time to build.
3. Would consider a PR to avoid showing modal to bots if you could propose a good technique.

[decoy31]

1. I agree, anything outside of the way the logic is currently designed to show the modal, would definitely decrease the impact of the modal. I suppose the developer can choose how to implement the modal on their end to mitigate the SEO issue (choosing when to call the js script).
2. Had there been time to implement the smaller banner, what would clicking the "TAKE ACTION" button do?
3. Personally, I am unsure of a good technique to know if the requestor is a bot from client side. (Maybe someone else knows.)

[devsnek]

i would say it would be pretty safe to call anything with a mozilla/5.0 (compatable; ...) useragent to be a bot, although i don't know why skipping the banner for bots would needed. bots would be affected by the rulings just like real users, so i say make the people who run the bots deal with banners on their scraped pages.

[mikemorris]

I'm going to close this as wontfix because we won't be able to test this thoroughly enough to safely exclude only crawlers and bots. For anyone looking to implement this functionality in a fork, https://github.com/monperrus/crawler-user-agents looks like a pretty thorough and up-to-date list of crawler UAs.

[milko1]

just open new PR from my own fork addressing this bot exclusion (& more):
#160

this is in production in my own site, as I think there might negative effects in SEO rankings to this constant popup.

in any case, we want lots of sites to use this widget, put our self-righteousness aside to achieve our goals, for this we need volume & pressure, so anything that might incentivize website admins to add this widget is good, & adding these features might help, by allowing them to better manage/tweak/turn on/off with options