Have you ever tried clicking the back button in your browser, only to realise the website you’re on somehow doesn’t allow that? Out of all the millions of annoyances on the web, Google has decided to finally address this one: they’re going to punish the search rankings of websites that use this back button hijacking.
Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site’s performance in Google Search results. To give site owners time to make any needed changes, we’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on June 15, 2026.
↫ Google Search Central
It’s always uncomfortable when Google unilaterally takes actions such as these, since rarely do Google’s interests align with our own as users. This is in such rare case, though, and I can’t wait to see this insipid practice relegated to the dustbin of history.
Thom Holwerda,
I can’t even remember the last time it’s happened. What’s more prevalent for me is having navigation buttons that either don’t work at all or break after posting a form – the browser pops up a dialog box indicating the data will be re-posted if you continue. I suspect this is several orders of magnitude more common, although it’s not so much a malicious act as it is just the way browsers work when posting forms.
Should be immediate. The sites don’t this aren’t going to sites that are generally going to be nice, positive sites for users. Punish them right away *sigh*
Google wont punish their own internet properties of course, but I find it quite annoying when a youtube video happens to end while I was looking at the other video links on the side of the video and youtube auto-navigates to an unwanted video. Naturally I try to use the back button to try and get back to where I was before only to find that all the previous video links are gone. In other words clicking “back” generates a new unwanted list of links… So in a way youtube is an example of back button hijacking.
I always open links to new sites with Command-Click (in a new tab), so I wasn’t aware of the problem at all, lol.
Google should punish it’s own in-house apps on Android for doing this same damned thing to Android – that back button is almost completely useless in apps like youtube.
I hate even more sites that override the browsers search function.
Minor issue of wording here. I think you mean “insidious” not “insipid”.
Should deal with other annoyances too, like arbitrarily trying to disable cut+paste or right click.
Lots of sites seem to do this on various forms which is extremely irritating. Having to type out a (potentially long) address by hand instead of pasting it only serves to increase the risk of errors.
And they should also penalize sites which don’t support modern features (IPv6, TLSv1.3 etc), this would help drive progress forward.
bert64,
That is indeed frustrating, though I think blame goes to the browser makers for allowing websites to disable those functions. Rather than propose new heuristics, they could just fix the browser.
I know this is tangential to your post, but I’ve become very disappointed in google holding back IPv6 adoption. 100% of businesses out by me are still only on IPv4 networks. Unfortunately google themselves are a big part of the problem. One stupid google employ has refused to support DHCPv6 in android in an effort to dictate networking policies for others. This backfired and leaves companies stuck on IPv4. Google should fire his ass and finally let network admins do their jobs.
https://articles.akadata.ltd/the-lunacy-of-ipv6-64-and-googles-refusal-to-support-dhcpv6/
I still don’t have IPv6 avail at home, but if I did frankly android’s idiotic IPv6 limitations would still force me to use IPv4 for subnetting. All of the major platforms support DHCPv6 except for google’s. They are they only ones holding us back with their forced policy nonsense.
SLAAC is the standard for IPv6 auto configuration, DHCPv6 is an optional spec that provides some additional features, so Android simply chooses not to implement the optional spec except when making use of one of these features (prefix delegation). There are MANY other devices which don’t have DHCPv6, Android is just the most visible one.
But on the other hand you have a LOT of really lousy ISPs that implement “bare minimum” IPv6, which currently means you get a /64 because that’s the smallest SLAAC will work with. If Android worked with DHCPv6 and allowed for assignment of subnets smaller than /64 then i guarantee you these terrible ISPs would give much smaller allocations and wouldn’t care at all about incompatibility with random niche appliances. The fact Android is widespread enough forces them to provide at least .64.
Can you even think of any scenarios beyond “im stuck with legacy thinking and want to copy a legacy setup” where you’d actually want/need to use DHCPv6 to assign addresses to phones and tablets (which 99% of Android devices are)? I can’t think of any practical scenario, so DHCPv6 just provides unnecessary extra overhead.
bert64,
Name them. Android is the only mainstream platform blocking DHCPv6 for more enterprises. MacOS/IOS/linux/windows all support it out of the box. Without DHCPv6, google are the only ones intentionally preventing network admins from having a direct upgrade path and letting administrators manage networks as they see fit. This has been the gripe of many network admins.
Your entitled to defend google on it if you like, but the fact remains they without a 1:1 TCPv4 to TCPv6 upgrade option, the majority of enterprises are sticking with IPv4, which sucks for everyone.
The article I linked to already highlights the problem here. Because of google you cannot create subnets…unless you revert to using NAT again….I hate NAT, everyone does. NAT was a hard byproduct of the IPv4 situation, but google have made it necessary for IPv6 again. Seriously fuck google for doing this and ruining IPv6. This is on them and they deserve to be called out for it.