How Google fought bad ads, sites and scammers in 2016

In its little autobiography called " How we fought bad ads, sites, and scammers in 2016", Google wants you to know how savage it can get. Recently, the search engine giant itself revealed that 1.7 billion ads have been removed that violated advertising policies, which is shockingly more than double the number of bad ads they took down in 2015.

Moreover, the company also claimed that their technology is much faster, otherwise, it would take 50 years to finish, if spent one second taking down each of those bad ads.

As per the numbers, Google disabled more than 780 million bad ads in 2015, 524 million in 2014, 350 million in 2013, and 220 million in 2012. So listed below are some of the examples of bad ads that Google took action on 2016.

Ads for illegal product

Most of the bad ads that company takes down are based on promoting illegal activities or products. Having said that, Google has disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations alone which is an increase from 12.5 million in 2015.

Misleading Ads

While most of the ads are click bait, which misleads people with false information, Google wants the advertisers to provide upfront information for people to make informed decisions. In 2016 alone, Google took down 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

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Bad Ads on mobile

These are based on 'Self Clicking' app, where you end up clicking your own advertisements. In 2015, they disabled a few thousand of these bad ads, but in 2016, they have disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms.

Ads trying to game the system

While products of certain ads are such as weight-loss supplements or payday loans are prohibited, but some try to trick the system to let them in. In 2016 they took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick the detection systems.

Apart from this, there were rise in tabloid cloaks where it tries to pretend as the trending news according to that situation but ends up in bad ads. In 2016, Google suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking.

Promoting and profiting from bad sites

Sometimes not only the ads but websites also get suspended when they promote ads that violate the rules. While they disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads last year, the company also took action on 8,000 sites promoting payday loans.