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:

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.