Google is Eyeing Mobile Affiliate Networks

This year Google has been making a tremendous amount of moves to improve the mobile user experience. They’ve added features and new ranking signals, and cracked down on certain practices.

As an extension of that last element, Google has been talking about going after mobile affiliate networks that hurt the user experience.

Google’s Andrey Lipattsev talked a little about this in a Google hangout, as Search Engine Land reports:

Andrey Lipattsev said this issue “is very close to my heart right now.” His team is working with him to detect these “mobile affiliate traffic driving networks” that “users are just being bounced from one place to another.” He said sometimes publishers add these networks to their site on purpose to make extra money but sometimes the publishers and even the advertisers are unaware of it.

Last month, Google warned webmasters that it will take action on sites caught engaging in “sneaky mobile redirects,” referring to URLs that load one thing from the desktop, but redirect users to different content from mobile search results.

Image via Google