Back Button Hijacking Will Now be Punished

Google is going to be punishing you if you hijack the back button. Command AI is exactly kind of what it says on the tin. Today, we're expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as back button hijacking, which will become an explicit violation of malicious practices of spam policies leading to potential spam actions. 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 the fundament this fundamental expectation. It occurs when the site interferes with the user's browser. Sorry, I should be zoomed in. Um 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. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then I sort of looked at it here. I looked at this video, back button hijacking, where you get taken through to a page or whatever. An advert or something. It's all It's always an advert. And then you try and go back cuz it's like, "What How do I How do I get here?" And then you just see like rewrites happen. And then you cannot escape. Or it just goes back to a page that again kind of again says it on here. Why is this a thing? It keeps you in the loop. It It It's advertising. Yeah, I would expect the browser to handle that. I would expect the browser to have in in its memory what was the previous page and Yeah. force the that page to be loaded. I don't know how this is working. But I think maybe it is doing something with cookies or with the No, with cookies. It's the history API. And you you you use it when you're doing um when you're building React applications. You actually write to the history API to track cuz um React is a It It's just one page, right? You're not actually navigating around. It's just or it's just JavaScript flipping around in one page. Yeah. And so you write to the history API, which does a couple of things. Obviously, writes to that history, but also rewrites the URL and sort of manages all of that sort of stuff. So it's all kind of a fake um navigation system. Mhm. So the consequence of this are cuz I was like, okay, so what what do you mean like what like uh what what is this How can you actually enforce something like this? Is it something that only they can only do in Chrome? They they're just not letting you do that or what? Basically, they're going to punish you by lowering your rankings, which of course plenty of people still very very much care about. But obviously, as you will be flagged at your website will be flagged as spam. And that obviously affects rankings, but also like the It's just It's just a bit of a a knife in the stomach about uh if you're going to do this, which makes sense. Like why would you need to do something like this? There might be legitimate reasons. That's what I I was thinking about. Are there legitimate reasons where you might actually want to do this? Um maybe again, may I don't like it, but when you trying to think of a website that does this, but once you're logged in, Webflow does this. Once you're logged in, you go to webflow.io and you can't go to Webflow's own homepage anymore when you're logged in. You have to log out or you have to go incognito and then you can go to webflow.io. Um that's really annoying. But that might be a way that if you wanted that behavior, rewriting the history might be a way to authentically do that. But regardless, it is against um what users want. This is why I don't like uh scroll hijacking because it's against what I'm trying to do as a user. I want to scroll to a certain point on the page based on my mouse settings. Um and uh I've noticed as well in Cloud Code and the CLI uh which we'll probably be using less of now based on news coming later on. But it it it scrolls faster than my fingers do on my trackpad. I want like I want to be able to just do that and lock in to the spot that I want. I don't want this added inertia. It frustrates me. It's not It's not very accessible. And again, if you've got motor skills and you you know, you can only move a little bit, but you want increased speed or whatever because you can only move a little bit, you want the website to respect that, you know? Yeah. Long-winded way of saying it makes sense why the back button hijacking is is, you know, being punished. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter. Command AI