With the Google page experience update coming to desktop sites in February 2022, that means that intrusive interstitials as a signal will also apply to desktop sites. John Mueller of Google confirmed this on Twitter saying "Yes, that's my understanding. Essentially all of the Page Experience factors would then apply to desktop too."
One of the factors of the page experience update is to not have intrusive interstitials. While that first only launched as a mobile signal back well before the page experience update - back in 2016-2017 - it will now apply to desktop sites.
Here is where Glenn Gabe pointed it out and John Mueller confirmed:
Yes, that's my understanding. Essentially all of the Page Experience factors would then apply to desktop too. That seems more consistent.
— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 5, 2021
I should note, that penalty when it launched in 2017, it had minimal impact then, just like the overall page experience update has minimal impact on rankings in 2020-2021 and likely in 2022.
Here is a bit more history:
Some of that also evolved into "sneaky redirects" where a part of the users got redirects to spammy / adult / affiliate sites instead of seeing the content. Thankfully that's pretty rare nowadays - apart from the "you won a phone" hacked sites...
— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 5, 2021
So keep in mind, if you use lots of interstitials on your desktop site that feel intrusive, you might not perform well with your page experience scores.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
