John Mueller of Google was asked by Michael Lewittes if those news websites you see overlay those call to actions asking you to sign up for their newsletter before seeing the content see harm in their Google rankings because of those actions. And yes, John Mueller said they would see the wrath of the mobile interstitial penalty.

The thing is, as you and I know, that mobile interstitial penalty, which began rolling out on January 20, 2017 (yea a while ago), really seems to have a minimal negative impact on sites. John kind of admitted it, he said in the hangout “Sometimes the tricky part there is with these slight demotions it’s not the case that we’ll remove the site from search or we’ll kind of like move it to page 100 or something like that. But if it’s really relevant content then maybe we’ll still show it on on the first page of the search results just not like as highly as it could be. “

The question was asked at the 21:35 mark into the video by Michael:

John Mueller responded:

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.