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.