For years, SEOs have focused on keywords while ignoring the “feel” of the page. This update changed that, and it’s the most importante in the News, Media, and Affiliate sites, which these seeing significant losses that look to strongly correlate with poor user experience.
Sites heavily penalised in this update often shared common traits:
Aggressive Ad Placement: Content buried under multiple banner ads.
Intrusive Pop-ups: Interstitials that block the user’s path to information.
Autoplay Videos: Particularly those that follow the user down the page.
Google’s “NavBoost” and other user-interaction signals have become more sensitive.
If a user clicks your result and immediately “pogo-sticks” back to Google because they can’t find the content amidst the ads, your rankings will suffer.