A Design Choice Making it Harder to Navigate Certain Websites

Some regular Internet readers have picked up that websites for mainstream businesses are adopting a trend in which their user interfaces and content pages are making it more difficult to return to the separate pages that users likely had come from. While any Internet browser supports a "Back" button in its user interface that brings the viewer to the previous URL the browser had opened up, this is not always ideal because various redirection scripts run by websites can make browsers technically register multiple URLs when shifting to a new page or section on the site. This occasionally causes some pages on a browser like Firefox to "stall" on the same page despite repeated attempts to press the button that is supposed to bring the user back one page.

The presence of a clearly defined "back" button near the bottom of a page on a modern website represents the assurance that the viewer would be taken to a page that more directly "precedes" it in terms of subject matter or link hierarchy, which is not always what the last URL registered in the browser turns out to be. However, some websites may consider obscuring or even removing such a seemingly basic feature from their content pages because they believe that its absence will compel viewers to stay on a given page longer, increasing the likelihood that the viewer will read and absorb the contents more thoroughly.

While Google does not necessarily penalize a website's SERP rankings over this practice, many believe this to be unbecoming of a supposedly consumer-oriented business because it impedes the user experience and makes the website more unwieldy to handle. It can be argued, however, that this does a lot to harm the actual profits the company intends to see from its business venture. Doing so ensures that a large fraction of potential customers will stop viewing the site altogether once they find out firsthand how hard it is to visit neighboring pages. If a website has a high bounce rate for this or any other reason, its offered services will receive fewer meaningful clicks. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/c24dls/websitesthatdisablethebackbuttonblackhat_seo/.