Misleading or Clickbait Push Notification Hurts SEO
Push notification spam is getting common. Sending fake notifications just to drive traffic can hurt your site rankings on serious grounds. Here is why.
In adherence to our rigorous editorial policy, this article's content has undergone careful testing for accuracy and trustworthiness and hence, this content is marked source of information. View editorial history of this content.
Nowadays when push notifications have got popular, deceptive practices to drive more traffic are also getting common.
Recently while observing Google Discover results, we found multiple websites utilizing headline and thumbnail clickbait techniques to get traffic. Some of them triggered a push notification permission box with the deceptive acceptance ‘No block them’, but actually it allowed notifications for that website.
Later our phone was spammed with lots of push notifications having totally different headings and descriptions. The misleading push notifications were similar to missed calls or new messages received on Instagram or similar.
Sample push notification templates that are considered misleading or clickbait:
Neha
3 New Missed Video Call
someone_2 Missed Call
You’re blocked.
someone_5 blocked you.
You have a new message.
Upon clicking one of the misleading push notifications, the website initially sent us to a webpage that redirected to the original one’s random article page. The article page had multiple advertisements. Probably more impressions and direct traffic rank were the reason for misleading notifications.
The clickbait technique might give a temporary benefit of more ad impressions, more direct traffic, more accidental ad clicks, or similar. Unfortunately, clickbait has a negative impact on SEO. Here is how:
- Misleading content is a violation of Google SEO Quality Guidelines.
- Clickbait generates more pogo clicks, hence, very poor dwell time on a page.
- Some professional or advanced users may report your website as spammy to Google.
- Pages get nearly zero engagement as the user quickly leaves with frustration.
Overall the quality of the website is dropped over time due to the poor stay time of a real user. Therefore, click-baiting and tricking users with misleading headlines, descriptions, and thumbnails do not help in the long run.
Though some webmasters and SEOs still try the black hat methods dreaming that they’ll get more display ad revenue such as from Adsense, it is strictly not recommended to try these techniques. Sooner or later, your website will get penalized due to either multiple spam reports or poor activity.
We recommend building useful content for your audience and trusting your efforts to flourish one day. It happens. True efforts never go unrewarded. Becoming a topical authority in the search engine is better than becoming a topical spammer.
Digital Setups has enforced a strict sourcing policy. Every content piece published on our website is passed through strict editorial review for contextual correctness, communication ethics, and programmatic tests wherever required. Our team research solutions from only credible, authentic, and trustworthy sources. Learn more about our editorial process.
This article may have additional citations but they are not yet reviewed for trustworthiness. We will add them here at our earliest.
Based on our editorial policy, we update our content time to time to ensure its usefulness, reliability, and validity.
Our standardized editorial process ensures right, timely, and usefulness updates to our content. Your honest opinion drives significant improvement to our content. We appreciate you are taking time to share that.
Readers who read this also found these helpful:
- Strange. Do you also see people dancing here and there?
- Authorship in SEO (2022)
- How Dynamic Content Rendering via Edge Workers Impact SEO
- OPTIONS / RTSP/1.0″ – Apache Access Log Entry
- eCommerce Business on Shopify vs. WordPress. Which is better?
- What you need to know before starting any online business
- Woo Express – How it works, Features, & Pricing
- Search Console: Fix “LCP issue: longer than 2.5s (mobile)” Issue
- Using ‘Advertisement’ or Similar Term above AdSense Ads
- TTFB: Time to First Byte – What it is, high TTFB causes, and fixes