Ahh the age old battle between light and dark. Google VS. Spammer. Benevolent search engine against the dark hordes of scammers. Or something like that…
Google has called out a new black hat trick on the Webmaster Blog. They’re kindly reminding webmasters to avoid deceptive practices as spammers are playing with browser history.
When users click the “back” button on their browser, they land on a new page that they’ve never visited before. Users coming from a search results page may think that they’re going back to their search results. Instead, they’re taken to a page that looks similar, but is actually entirely advertisements
source
Here’s what it looks like
It’s a fancy trick really. Though it’s not new it has gained attention as of late while making some black hatters a ton of money no doubt.
Now, I don’t know about you. But if I hit back and saw that page and not the SERPs, I’d spit and type in Google. However some folks are finding the whole process a bit confusing, naturally.
Google is threatening to completely remove URLs from the SERPs if they find this deceptive practice taking place.
To protect our users, we may take action on, including removal of, sites which violate our quality guidelines, including for inserting deceptive or manipulative pages into a user’s browser history.
It’s tough talk for a crowd that obviously don’t care much.
This is as black hat as it gets, a pure scam. I’m glad big G puts a stop to it!
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“inserting deceptive or manipulative pages into a user’s browser history”
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How DARE those black-hatters dilute the “browser-history quality” of BIG G’s data set. Dont those pesky black hatters know that the NSA will only pay TOP DOLLAR for clean, traceable & prosecutable data?
Nice report, thanks for sharing
These black hat people are making internet marketing harder on all of us. Just learn to do the game right and you can still make a whole lot of money.
This trick is old as hell. Dave Naylor talked about this back in 2008.
If you do it correctly it should look dead similar to a Google search result page.
I don’t seem to get it. I tried to do a search and then clicked the back button… nothing seems different.
Does this mean that my pc or my browser is SAE from this so called manipulative technique?
hhmm…..
Personally I’d spot this straight away, but I can see how less experienced computer/internet users could be easily fooled…
Awesome article.