The Content “Photobomb”
How to annoy and irritate your website visitors and make Google mad
If you really want to annoy and irritate your website visitors make sure that you:
Block the content they were enjoying by pop-up newsletter sign ups and other marketing ploys.
Make it hard to find the X to click them off.
But be careful, since for a few years now Google has been penalizing websites that hide content behind what they refer to as “intrusive interstitials” which they define as “pop-ups or sticky banners that cover a significant area of the main content of a page.” Google warns that use of these types of pop-ups may result in “lower search rankings” and that is in the opposite direction we all hope to go. Read more about this on the Google Search Console website.
How can you be sure you’re annoying your website visitors enough? By tracking your visitors' reactions on Google Analytics, a high bounce rate and low return visitors means that you have been successful at irritating your victims, ahem, visitors. You can probably guess that Google will factor in your “intrusive interstitials” as it is a page ranking factor.
Not to get off the subject but in the past few years one of the sweetest things in TV commercials has been llamas that appear silently behind the action of the advertisement. This is cute! To be annoying do the opposite—a llama photobomb.
Here are a few visuals to reenforce Cute vs. Annoying.
Cute llama tries to get into the selfie but stays in the background—definitely cute.
Two llamas attend a wedding keeping a pretty respectful distance from the bride and groom, although one llama sure has his eye on the groom’s boutonniere. Very Cute!
Next we have a man next to a llama. Llama is, again, keeping a respectful distance from the man. The llama seems to have something to say but, nevertheless, very cute!
A white llama photobombs a tan/brown llama’s moment in the spotlight. Hard to get him out of the picture. Definitely annoying!