Following up on questions around Google's newish mobile intrusive interstitials penalty. Yesterday we said that store locators that take up the whole screen can be an issue.
Today, John Mueller of Google confirmed that chat boxes that take up the whole or large portion of the screen can also be an issue. Sometimes you've seen them where a floating box is hovering over most of the content on your smartphone, asking you to chat with them. Those types of implementations can be an issue and get you hit by this "penalty."
I use chat support for one of my businesses, if you look at ShulCloud (it's a synagogue management platform) on your smartphone (or desktop) you will see a chat bubble on the bottom. We implemented it this way when we used both Olark and Intercom for our chat system. It doesn't distract or get in the way but it is obvious you can chat with us with this bubble.
That blue chat icon on the bottom.
Only when you click it does it go full screen on mobile:
So don't use those annoying full page hovers for chat boxes on your mobile site (or desktop). John Mueller called them "obnoxious."
@BrockEllison If you cover the page, that's pretty obnoxious, right? Use a banner instead.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) March 29, 2017
Forum discussion at Twitter.
