Google to start punishing mobile sites that show hard-to-dismiss popups

They should do this for all kind of pop-ups and interstitials regardless of size, intrusiveness, platform and "removability".

Apparently there's a meta-tag for iOS apps (apple-itunes-app) and Windows Phone, but none for Android.

The big problem with most of these prompts is that they come when you visit a page for the first time.

Instead you could mention your app and newsletter in a sidebar, menu or footer of the page where I'm gonna see it and eventually use when I visit the page more often.

Why do people think I want to install an app, subscribe to a newsletter, do a survey, etc before even reading the very first article on that site? Where does this "logic" come from? Are there any stats on these kinds of things? I bet there's a 99+% chance people just click it away. Why is annoying users such a big thing today?

It'll be interesting to see how they actually implement this because while the EU has this ridiculous Cookie law (you "need" informed consent) almost every serious commercial website has an annoying pop-over.

This could promote the less explicit sites over those that are just trying to follow a [ridiculous] law.

TFA does mention "legal obligations" being excluded but seriously, how are they judging this? Are annoying adverts for Millies Cookies going to be okay?