Google starts penalizing sites that "hijack" the browser back button

Petteri Pyyny
18 Apr 2026 2:35

Google has decided to bring badly behaving websites under better control and has announced a new change affecting visibility in its search engine.
Starting June 15, Google will automatically reduce the visibility in its search results of sites that "hijack" the user's browser back button for themselves.

The practice is quite common on even slightly dubious sites. It works so that when you try to go back from the site - for example to the search engine results - tapping the back button instead opens the site's front page, a prompt asking "are you really leaving our site", or perhaps an advertisement.
Google describes the problem in its own blog as follows:

When a user clicks the "back" button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user's browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.

Of course, nothing prevents sites from continuing to use such techniques, but according to Google's official policy, such sites will soon be classified as "spam sites", which will significantly reduce their visibility in Google's search results.