Google started penalizing websites having unwanted sneaky mobile redirects

Google had already warned the webmasters tricking mobile users with unwanted redirects back in October 2015. Well, Google has announced on Wednesday that they have been taking action on the sites that sneakily redirect mobile users to spammy domains. Google has cracked the news on Google+ and Twitter. Well, this could be the wake-up call for the swindler webmasters cheating mobile users. Redirecting users to unwanted spammy sites from mobile search result can hurt both mobile and desktop web appearance of the website.

Google wrote in the Google+ announcement, “As mentioned in Webspam Report 2015, spam reports from users are an important part of our spam-fighting efforts. They often help us surface issues that frustrate users – like the trend of websites redirecting mobile users to other, often spammy domains.” And added, “To combat this trend, we have been taking action on sites that sneakily redirect users in this way.”

So, it is definitely not good having sneaky redirects on the website. Let’s discuss a bit what Google actually means by unwanted sneaky redirects. It is when a user gets redirected to the website that he/she is not expecting from the search result. Sometimes when you search for your website from desktop and search result drives you through right destination. But when you search the same query from a mobile device, search result redirects you to the different location. It is called the sneaky redirect.

There could be few reasons for website having sneaky redirects. One is if your website gets hacked, hackers may have setup sneaky redirect. Another possibility is with having display advertising on your website. If you have installed the script of display ad on your website, that may also cause the unwanted spammy redirect. Google doesn’t send any notifications for such manual actions. So, manually searching for your domain on the mobile device is the only way to know if your website is suspicious or not.

Don’t worry if you find your website affected by the manual action due to sneaky redirects. Google has also shared a Help Center Article that will help webmasters get rid of sneaky redirect manual action.