Google Bans 200 Sites for Promoting Fake News [REPORT]

Google’s 2016 bad ads report reveals details on how its recent policy against “misrepresentative content”, otherwise known as fake news, is affecting publishers.

Since November and December of 2016, Google has permanently banned 200 publishers from its ad networks for promoting misrepresentative content. In total 540 sites were reviewed, and at least some action was taken against 340 of them. This is the first time Google has included a section regarding fake news in its bad ads report.

Also included in the report are details about the 1.7 billion total ads taken down in 2016 for violating Google’s policies, which is over twice the amount of bad ads removed in 2015.

The following is a summary of several of the key statistics highlighted in Google’s report.

Google’s 2016 Bad Ads Report

• Payday Loan Ads: Since banning payday loan ads in July 2016, Google has removed more than 5 million of them from its network.
• Ads for Illegal Products: Google removed 68 million ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2016. In addition, 17 million ads for illegal gambling violations were removed in 2016.
• Misleading Ads: Google removed 80 million ads in 2016 for deceiving, misleading, and shocking users.
• Mobile Ads: Google disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking mobile ads in 2016.
• Ads Trying to Deceive Google: Nothing gets past Google — 7 million ads were removed for intentionally attempting to trick the search giant’s detection systems.
• Bad Sites: Google took action on over 75,000 “bad sites”, sites which bad ads point to, in 2016.

All together, if only one second was spent taking down each ad that was removed in 2016, it would take a total of 50 years to finish the job. Good thing Google has automated technologies and a large team dedicated to protecting searchers from bad ads.