Two things will happen if you don't fix your back button hijacking, and neither of them is good.

The first is a manual spam action:

A real human at Google reviews your site, decides it's violating the policy, and your pages get removed or seriously demoted from search results. You'll get a notification in Google Search Console, but by that point, the damage to your traffic is already done.

The second is algorithmic demotion:

Google's automated systems quietly detect the issue and drop your rankings with zero warning and zero notification. You just start losing traffic and spend weeks wondering why.

And it's not just one or two pages on your website that'll be affected. Depending on how widespread the issue is, your entire domain could be affected. For an e-commerce brand that depends on organic search to bring in customers, that's a serious problem.

Open your website, click through a few pages, then hit the back button. If you land somewhere unexpected, if it takes more than one click to go back, or if you get a pop-up as you try to leave, you have a back-button hijacking problem.

Do this on both desktop and mobile because the behaviour can differ on each.

You can also have someone review your JavaScript for any use of history.pushState or history.replaceState. These are the functions scripts use to inject fake pages into your browser history.

Also, check every third-party script running on your site. Go through your ad networks, analytics tools, tag manager tags, pop-up plugins, and affiliate scripts one by one.

If you're not sure what something is doing, temporarily disable it and run the back button test again. If the problem disappears, you've found your culprit.

Once you've identified what's causing the issue, remove it, replace it with a compliant version, or contact the third-party provider to have them resolve it on their end.

If you've already received a manual spam action and have resolved the issue, you can submit a reconsideration request through Google Search Console. Google's team will review it and, if everything checks out, lift the penalty.

If the demotion was algorithmic rather than manual, there's no formal reconsideration process; your rankings will recover naturally as Google re-crawls your site and confirms the issue is gone.

Either way, the deadline is June 15, 2026. That's your window to get this sorted before enforcement begins.

This is exactly the kind of thing we help ecommerce brands with at Pro Marketer (catching issues before they become penalties while maintaining your search visibility).

If you're not sure whether your site is affected, or you'd just rather have someone else take a proper look, get in touch with us by simply replying to this email.

We'll audit your site and tell you exactly where you stand.

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P.S. Got a question, trend, or idea you want me to cover in the next newsletter? Hit reply, I'm all ears!