If you’ve ever been stuck on a website because the back button on your browser doesn’t seem to work, you will probably have been the victim of a back button hijack. Google is not pleased.
‘Victim’ is a bit strong. So is ‘hijacking’, come to that. It is massively annoying though. Basically what happens is that you visit a website, usually from a Google search, and when you try to go back to the Google listing the same page loads, or a different page from the same website, or a load of ads. You either have to press ‘back’ quite a few times to get to where you started, or go into search history to find the link that you want.
Developers for certain websites add a cheeky bit of Javascript in the code that prevents users from going back one step in their browsing journey and is intended to keep them on the site as long as possible. The main culprits are websites that generate revenue from advertising but I’ve experienced back button hijacking on well-known national newspaper websites (I’ve had to delete visits to the Daily Express website from my browser history for fear of shame and embarrassment) and local newspaper sites.
It happened this very morning when searching for updates on the moribund fate of Sheffield Wednesday (love knows no boundaries) in the ‘news’ option in a Google search. After reading the article in Sheffield’s local rag, the back button on my mobile browser took me to the website’s home page, rather than back to the news search.
Google’s recent notice about back button hijacking has now been included in Google’s spam policies. After what they have deemed to be a significant rise in this behaviour, they are urging website owners to remove hijacking code before June 15th 2026 to avoid websites being penalised and demoted in search engine rankings otherwise sites will be “an explicit violation of the malicious practices of spam policies…”. The practice “interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration…. Malicious practices create a mismatch between user expectations and the actual outcome, leading to a negative and deceptive user experience, or compromised user security or privacy.”
One of the biggest considerations for any website development is user-experience which is an important element for website ‘stickability’ and, thus, website rankings. Back button hijacking clearly interferes with user experience and the ‘user journey’ – i.e. it should be clear to a user where they are going to end up when they click a button. People have reported feeling ‘manipulated’ (Seriously? Some people lead charmed lives.) and wary of visiting unfamiliar sites. Ultimately, for most people, it’s irritating, bad form, a cheap hack, and just makes you hate the website you’ve visited, so it’s good that action is being taken. If this is now becoming part of their spam policy, I hope they’ll do something about overuse of intrusive ads – especially ones with the tiny tiny ‘X’ on mobile phones.
What happened to proper hijacking? Not really a thing anymore. There used to be loads when I was a kid.
Author: Rich
