In the ongoing war between Google and those who practice black hat SEO tactics it is always a game of cat and mouse. As Google learns about and punishes one technique, the black hat SEO experts come up with a new way to try to get their sites to rank better than they should. The latest black hat scheme has sites users who hit the back button not back to the previous page (which is typically the search engine results page) but to an entirely new site which is filled with advertisements.
Those ads are set up to emulate the normal Google results page so people believe they are clicking on organic search results provided by Google, but it is actually a third party ad which may go to very questionable pages.
This is a particularly dangerous technique because of the fact that it can redirect people to pages with malware, virus’s or other damaging sites. In a blog post Google says, “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.”
Threatening complete removal of sites from the Google SERPs is a serious thing, and Google hopes it will keep this latest trend from expanding any further than it already has. At this point it seems that only sites which intentionally have this technique added are redirecting the users. Whether or not there will be a virus or malware which infects WordPress (or other CMSs) with this type of thing has yet to be seen, but it seems likely given the history of Black Hat techniques.
As always, Google’s Search Quality Team also commented in the blog post that website owners should always focus on creating high quality sites which use only the approved, “White Hat” SEO methods.
