How often have you surfed on over to a website on your phone, only to have it prompt you to download its app before proceeding? Some websites that come to mind include Yahoo and Tapatalk, which is frankly a bit annoying since it does slow down your experience a bit as it needs to load things twice.
Thankfully Google is empathizing with you guys and has announced some changes that they will be making to its mobile search results. Basically any website that prompts users to download its app before allowing access to content will lose its mobile-friendly status. This is different than websites that have install banners at the top (think Instagram on the web) which according to Google, provides a more consistent user experience.
This is versus full page prompts which according to Google, “Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the web page.” In fact Google tested this out themselves and found that only 9% of visitors to the website clicked the “Get App” link, suggesting that this method of app promotion is less effective than one thinks.
They also found that a whopping 69% of users ended up abandoning the page simply because of that. So if you’re not a fan of these kinds of prompts, come 1st November these websites will no longer be listed as mobile-friendly and should rank lower in the search results on mobile in the future.