In a Google Hangout with Google's Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist, last week, with Anton Shulke, Bill Slawski, Jon Henshaw and Ammon Johns - Andrey Lipattsev said at the 25 minute 16 second mark that he and his colleagues at Google are actively working on targeting deceptive and unscrupulous mobile affiliate traffic networks that redirect unsuspecting mobile users to landing pages they are not aware of.
Let me quote what Andrey said, or at least try to, I did my best with the sound quality and the accent:
There are still a bunch of big things and they have not gone away.You mentioned affiliate networks. The way I would specify that particular item, it is very close to my heart right now, is the mobile affiliate traffic driving networks. The ones in particular that are engaged in selling mobile traffic from publishers to a whole bunch of programmatic solutions. Very often without the publisher or the advertising network knowing what is happening in between and users are just being bounced from one place to another. To me personally and a bunch of my colleagues that is a big deal. That is something we are looking at...
Some don’t care about their mobile users and they sell that traffic and land their mobile users somewhere. That is upsetting. That is something we will be dealing with.
He goes on more to talk about the issue. But what Google sees happening is that knowingly or unknowingly, sites are redirecting their mobile users to bad pages. Google clearly wants to be able to detect this better and take action on sites that are doing this.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
Google did warn about mobile sneaky redirects recently, but this seems to go beyond this warning.
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