Friday, July 12, 2013
Our quality guidelines
prohibit manipulative or deceptive behavior, and this stance has remained unchanged since the
guidelines were first published over a decade ago. Recently, we’ve seen some user complaints about
a deceptive technique which inserts new pages into users’ browsing histories. 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:
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.
As always, if you believe your site has been impacted by a manual spam action and is no longer
violating our guidelines, you can let us know by
requesting reconsideration.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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