Ep. 62 - Google’s New Spam Crackdown: What Every Law Firm Needs to Know

Most law firms are focused on content, keywords, and backlinks when it comes to SEO.

But there’s a new technical issue Google is cracking down on that many firms don’t even realize exists — and it could quietly hurt your rankings if you ignore it.

In this episode, I’m breaking down Google’s newest spam policy update surrounding something called “back button hijacking” and why it matters for your website before June 15.

The reality is: Google doesn’t really care whether the issue came from malware, outdated plugins, bad code, or a third-party script. If it’s happening on your site, your rankings could still take the hit.

I’ll walk you through:

• What back button hijacking actually is
• How to test your website in just a few minutes
• Why plugins and third-party tools can create hidden SEO problems
• What your SEO agency should already be checking
• How malware and outdated scripts can interfere with user navigation
• Why technical SEO audits matter more now than ever

The good news?
This is one of the easier SEO problems to catch early — if you know what to look for.

And sometimes, the smallest technical issues are the ones that cause the biggest drops in visibility.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. For my returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenue from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Now, in the last few weeks, we've talked at some length about checking your website, making sure your links work the way they're supposed to, and that they point where they're supposed to point, and that your content is kept up to date, that everything in your metadata is tight and that everything looks good and does what it should. But here's one area where a lot of people don't think about double checking and making sure it works properly. And that's your website and browser's back buttons. Now you may be thinking, oh, that's on the browser. That's not us. And to a point, they may be true. However, Google recently rolled out a new spam policy update that includes back button hijacking as one of their prohibited categories of conduct. So what is back button hijacking? Have you ever gone to a website and clicked on the back button and it wound up taking you somewhere that you had no intention of going? Or it doesn't go back or it throws up an ad that you didn't ask for instead of just, well, taking you back to where you want to go. That is back button hijacking. Now, this can happen for a number of reasons. It could be a script problem on your website, it could be a script problem on a third-party content management plugin, or it could be malicious software. But Google's new policy says that they don't care why it's happening. It's a problem, and if it's there, it needs to be dealt with. Sites that don't comply with this updated spam policy by June 15th can be either manually or automatically demoted in Google rankings. That's a problem. And it's a big problem. So you're probably thinking, Well, how do I check that? Well, the good news is this is really easy to check. Simply go to your website, click on a bunch of pages. It doesn't matter what they are, but click on them and then try to go back using your back button. You should see at every step, okay, I clicked on this page and then I clicked on this page and then this page, and then I went back, and then I went back and did it again, and everything worked the way that it should. Uh then if that happens, you have no problem and you have nothing to worry about. If that's the case, keep on doing what you're doing. If you don't see the last page that you clicked on when you click the back button, now you have an issue. Now you have something that you need to fix and fix urgently. So the first thing is to identify where the problem is. Do you have any third-party content aggregators? Uh, do you have promoted ads on your site? Do you have plugins and you're not really sure what they do? Those might be your culprits. Now again, if your SEO agency has this set up, they should already be aware of this and they should be moving on it. But if you do not have an SEO agency, if you built your website from scratch yourself, then you need to go through and take a hard look at some things. What are the plugins? What do they do? Are these plugins known to cause this problem? The quickest and easiest way that you can test is by temporarily deactivating any third-party content aggregators, social media plugins, things like that. That will help you zero in on where the problem is. If you don't find it there, it may be an error in your code. Maybe something got updated and it wasn't done correctly. It could be as simple as a tracking pixel that was improperly embedded. And that's where you have to really drill down and find out what's going wrong. Now, like I said, if the back button works as it should on your site and you don't have any problems with it, then you're great. But before you say, okay, I checked it out, everything's good to go, remember, you may not get the same behavior across all platforms. So you need to check it on a laptop and a PC. You need to check it on a tablet, you need to check on your phone, and you also need to have somebody else do it. Always, always double test. If you want to, triple test. More is always better when it comes to making sure that everything on your site works properly. It's the people that don't do that, don't double check, or they say, well, it's third party, so it's not our problem. Well, Google doesn't see it that way. Your site is the one that's going to pay for it. Just like with any kind of other type of malicious or spam or other problems, it doesn't matter where it originates. It's your site and it's your responsibility. And they will start penalizing people on June 15th. So you want to get on this as quickly as possible. Now, if you're not sure where the problem is or if you've tried deactivating any third-party plugins and they're still not working, then it may be the time to call in somebody to take a look at your code to see if they can figure out where the problem is. Like I said, your SEO agency, if you have one and if they're good, they should already be on top of this. They should have already verified this before you ever even thought about it. And if they haven't, it's really, really simple to find out. Because if you click on three pages and you click the back button, and anywhere in there, something weird happens, like you wind up showing up to another site or you see an ad. It doesn't matter. The back button should do one thing and one thing only. It should return you back to the previous page. And if that doesn't happen, you have a problem. And if your SEO agency hasn't already caught it and fixed it, you need to find out why. Now you may be thinking, okay, how can this interfere with the back button on the browser? How's that my fault? Well, there's a number of ways that improperly written or maliciously written code can create these issues. It doesn't mean you necessarily did anything wrong. It could be that somebody injected malware into your website and you didn't know it happened. This happens all the time. Unfortunately, cyber attacks are a fact of modern life. In the 80s and 90s, we didn't have these problems nearly to the degree that we do today. Nobody was going after doctors, dentists, and lawyers. Nobody was trying to hack Coca-Cola's website. They were looking at bigger fish, the government agencies, military applications, things of this nature. But now people do it just for chuckles. They do it for the laughs they get. And they do it sometimes with no real motive, or it's impossible to figure out what the motive is. So it is possible that you could have done everything right and still have this happen. But they're not the ones who are going to get penalized. You are. It's black hat SEO that you had nothing to do with, but it's still your website, and Google says it's your responsibility to know this and be on top of it. Now again, if your SEO agency hasn't caught up with this, you need to find out why. Because if anybody should be on top of this, it should be your SEO agency. But like I said, thankfully, this is very, very easy to check. And if you don't see this behavior in your back button, you don't have a problem. Now the penalties for this are where things get really weird. Google is also adding in a way to manually report sites more easily that engage in black hat SEO activity. So user reporting is going to go way, way up. At the same time, the automated gatekeepers, the algorithms, and so forth are getting more stringent on this and they are cracking down. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and he mentioned that he's been through something like 20 websites in a day looking for something. And about half of them, he said, had this back button hijacked. And it's annoying and it does happen. But if your clients come to your site, they want to be able to reliably see what they came for. They want to be able to go back and get the information they just saw and they want to do it quickly without unnecessary stops. So the problem is if you get demoted because one of these things after June 15th are still happening. And if you're manually reported, you can apply for reconsideration. But if the algorithm catches you, the current language and their spam policy says it's probably going to stick now. They may change this in the future. Google's always tweaking and refining and making sure that their language is as up to date as possible. However, uh, like I said, if you want to double check this and you want to make sure you double check regularly, every time you add something to your site, whether it's a new page, a new blog post, a new social media plugin, it doesn't matter what it is. If it's installed on your site, you need to double check the back button as one of the first things you do. Along with, of course, everything else. If you do that and there's no problem, you're golden. You don't have a problem. However, Google is delaying the rollout on enforcement, just to be fair. They're giving everybody a chance. Every time you add something to your site, whether it's a new page, a new blog post, a new social media plugin, it doesn't matter what it is. If it's installed on your site, you need to double check the back button as one of the first things you do, along with, of course, everything else. If you do that and there's no problem, you're golden and you don't have a problem. Now, Google's delaying the rollout on enforcement, to be fair. They're giving everybody a chance to figure out on their own how to fix this before they step in and start swatting sites down. So that's to their credit. But you need to make sure that you know that it's happening on your site. Now, like I said, you don't have to check it every day. You don't have to check it every other day. But it's always a good idea to go through at least once a week, once every couple weeks, and make sure that everything's functioning the way it should, the links, the metadata, et cetera. Now you can just add the back button into your checklist. And if it's done right, it shouldn't take you more than say a minute and a half. If you open every single page on your website sequentially and you go back using the back button and you go back to the same pages in reverse order, then you know things are working. Now, uh, you know, you want to make sure it's doing what it should, and then you have no issue and you can move on. But once you install a third-party anything or an update or change anything, you need to circle back and run that audit again. Now, a lot of people, especially with more established websites that have been around for years, they haven't had this problem. They're going to click through, say, okay, no big deal, and they'll move on. But an ounce of prevention here is worth a pound of cure. It's always a good idea to review any third-party anything that you install on your site. If you're showing ads for anything, if you're linking to outside uh companies, outside agencies, or what have you, if those links, links work, uh then something could be wrong. You need to double check the back button. Uh and you also remember that the entire purpose of this is to ensure smooth and fluid navigation on both forward and backwards history. So if you don't have that, uh turn you if you don't have that working right, you're gonna turn off users. They're probably not gonna want to visit your site again. And of course, Google will give you some support and some leeway, at least for the in the short term. But after that, you may notice that your ranking starts slipping. Now, on the other hand, it's not all bad news. What I mean is if your competitors are not as diligent about checking as as you are, their websites will fall as well. In that case, their loss is your gain because their site is showing bad behavior, and that helps increase your rankings. So Google is not going to give them the same priority that they give to a website that's doing everything right, and that just makes good sense. So you need to be the one on top of that. At the end of the day, Google doesn't care where the problem originated from or why this behavior is happening or what caused it. The fact is that it is happening, and that's all that needs to be said. So be sure to check your back button. If you haven't done it recently, do it now. Uh now, if everything's working fine, great. Uh it doesn't mean that you don't have uh won't have a problem next week or after that. But starting June 15th, you don't get any additional leeway. You're just going to watch your website getting demoted and demoted and demoted until all of a sudden you're on page four or five. Now, if you're on page five, you might as well not be on the internet at all because nobody's going to see it unless they're really dedicated to finding your specific site. Now, we've talked a lot about uh other black hat tactics that people use, and nobody seems to be really sure why back button hijacking has suddenly come up as a thing. It's not the most obvious line of attack in the world, but ultimately it's fair to speculate that if you follow the money, uh, you'll find where the problems uh originate. And if it's not you, then it's going to be with somebody else, but you pay the penalty. Uh either way, it doesn't matter. You don't want this penalty impacting your website, and you don't want that smoke uh and the type of results that that come from having your any of your back buttons hijacked. Now, the quicker you get this fixed, the happier you and your clients are going to be. Now, some of you have already talked to a prospective or current client who said, Hey, I was trying to get to such and such page on your website, and when I hit the back button, I saw this ad. Uh, that's a red flag, and you need to jump on that right away. But that's rare. How many clients or prospective clients are going to take the time to let you know? Um, in rare cases, it could be a hardware issue uh and it could be something that somebody meant to hit one button and they hit another. That happens, and that's not your fault. Hardware and user error issues, there's not much you can do about that. But if it's a software issue, Google is going to notice. And if you don't deal with it, Google will deal with it. And their way of dealing with it is harsh, and that's by demoting your site. So protect yourself. Make sure your back button works, along with any of the buttons that you see on the navigation page. Make sure they do what they're supposed to do. Most of the time, if they don't, it's either user error or a software issue. Hardware issues are incredibly rare here. Now, these things could be totally benign software problems. Let's put it this way it's not that they're intentionally interfering with the back button, but somehow, some way, something in the script is causing websites to not do what they're supposed to do. Google doesn't like that. It looks bad on Google, it looks bad on your site. So of course, they're going to want to deal with it as quickly and proactively as they can, which is why they're saying, hey, we're rolling out this new policy. Again, if your SEO agency uh is is doing their job and they're competent, they should already be on top of this. Um and they should have already taken care of it or at least be figuring out where it's coming from. But you need to do your own due diligence. At the end of the day, it's not your SEO's agency that'll pay the price for your site going down. Uh, it's not, they're not the ones that people are going to remember, and they're not the ones that are burdened with fixing this. That's ultimately on you. And you don't want your name associated with this, you don't want your website falling, uh, whether it's because of benign incompetence or malicious intent uh from malware or some other third party. In Google's eyes, and even in your clients' and your visitors' eyes, it's the same thing. The why doesn't matter. It's the what and the what is being done about it that matter. So take care of that and make sure you incorporate this into your weekly check-in. Yes, I know it's one more thing to deal with, it's one more headache, and it's one more problem that you have to match. Unfortunately, that's what a lot of SEO is. And as things change and as things evolve, algorithms continue to get more sophisticated. Devices and code continue to get more sophisticated, and there are more and more ways for things to break. So keep that in mind and make sure this becomes a regular part of your SEO audit. Because if Google thinks that this is this big of a deal, then you need to be right there with it. Your audit should always include checking all of your third-party plugins, all of your different content aggregators, things like that. Because one of them may have thrown uh may have blown a gasket, one of them may not be supported anymore, one of them might be out of date. Make sure everything's updated, make sure everything's running the way it should. Legitimate third-party content aggregators and social media plugins and so forth, they'll routinely update. And if you've got a plugin that's out of date, get rid of it. Either update it or get it out of your website. So keep that in mind and be thinking about how you can protect yourself from this. One thing that you should absolutely do before a plugin is installed is make sure that everything about your website is backed up. If it's working the way it should, uh and you install a third-party anything, you should check it first in a sandbox to make sure the way it works, the way it's supposed to work before you deploy it to the general public. Also, keep a backup of your primary website as it is now. If everything's working today, if uh it's working a week from now, if it's working two weeks from now, great, back it up. Make sure that all of your code is somewhere safe where you can restore it if you have to. Because if you've got a faulty plug-in or whatever, it's going to impact your site. Now, if you have an SEO agency and they're worth their salt, they should already be on top of this. If they're not, you're going to want to give somebody a call and get help. And that's the best way of protecting your website from being demoted by Google just because of malicious behavior that you didn't know anything about. But before you can do anything about it, you have to know that it's there. Again, I'm John Risvie, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Before you leave today, I'd appreciate it if you could click the like button. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any updates from this channel. And don't forget to share with your friends and colleagues, other attorneys who may find this podcast helpful. Thank you for stopping by today, and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and ideas on making your firm's digital presence stronger and more durable. I look forward to seeing you next time.