In the long run, though, the second change may be more wide-reaching: starting on January 10, 2017, the company will start punishing mobile pages that show intrusive interstitials when a user first opens a page and they will rank lower in its search results.
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So, there are significant changes coming to Google Search.
With that in mind, if a site uses a pop that appears at the beginning of an article or after the user has scrolled a certain length down the page, hiding the text underneath, Google considers that a no-no and may begin penalizing the offending sites in search results.
Google will be dropping the familiar “Mobile-friendly” tag from all mobile friendly results when someone does a search on a mobile device. This is an example of poor user experience because users can not easily access the information they were looking for. That means popups that covers the main content after users navigate to a page or as they are looking through it, as well as standalone interstitials that have to be dismissed before you can access the main content and pages that show what looks like a standalone interstitial above the fold. While the underlying content is present on the page and available for the index, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. For example, this would include private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.
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Sometimes they just pop up and get in the way of the website contents. If the site still has quality content in an area that a user has searched for, the result will still be returned, obtrusive advertising or not. So if a page has relevant content, it may rank higher than others.
