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Chrome 71 will block all ads on sites with persistent malicious ad abuse

In December, sites which have persistent abusive experiences when it comes to malicious ad content will have all ads blocked by Chrome.
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November 5, 2018
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TL;DR
  • Starting in December 2018, Chrome 71 will remove all ads on sites with persistent abusive ad experiences.
  • This will include sites with pop-ups and new window requests which do things like redirecting pages.
  • Site owners can use the Abusive Experiences Report in their Google Search Console to see if their site is getting all ads blocked.

When Chrome 71 arrives in December 2018, it will have a new feature which will hopefully make surfing the web a better experience for everyone.

The new feature is that Chrome will remove all ads on the small number of sites with persistent abusive experiences when it comes to malicious advertisements. The new protocol is part of a larger ambition of Google’s to better protect users from intentionally misleading content.

It’s happened to everyone: you’re visiting a website when a pop-up ad appears which looks a lot like a system warning. You click on the “close” button but it’s not actually a close button — it’s just another link. Before you know it, you’re on a site which is clearly (or sometimes not) a phishing scheme intending to steal your personal information.

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Google previously tried to fight this problem by issuing a set of protections within Chrome which blocked pop-ups and new window requests from sites with certain abusive experience. Now, Google is pushing things even farther by blocking all ad content in general on sites which have a persistent history of abuse.

Site owners can use the Abusive Experiences Report in their Google Search Console to see if their site contains any of these abusive experiences which need to be corrected or removed. Site owners will have a 30-day window to fix experiences flagged by the report before Chrome removes ads.

Hopefully, this new strategy will bring down the hammer hard on sites which are little more than phishing hubs. However, attacking malware on the internet is a bit like Whack-a-Mole, with one solution creating another problem. Either way, this seems like a step in the right direction.