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In the fight against irritating and misleading advertisements, Google has made a rigorous decision. As of December, Chrome will block all advertisements on websites that try to mislead users into clicking on an advertisement. Site administrators are first given a warning and thirty days to change the situation. If they don’t, there will be no more advertisements in Chrome.

Google will announce this on Monday. The feature will come with the next version of Google Chrome to internet users worldwide. This is part of a broader initiative to create some support for internet ads. Users are still too often inclined to block ads, while sites depend on the revenue they generate from them.

Block misleading ads

All advertisements that Google defines as misleading will no longer be allowed. Google has published an extensive definition for this on its site. It concerns the following types of advertisements:

  • Fake messages: ads that look like chat apps, alerts or dialog boxes and entice the user to click.
  • Unexpected click areas: an invisible element on a page that suddenly leads to an advertisement or other page when the user clicks on it.
  • Deceptive Site Behavior: Page features that lead to an ad when a user clicks on it. Think of scroll bars and play buttons.
  • Phishing: advertisements or elements that try to steal personal information or persuade users to share it.
  • Automatic redirection: advertisements that allow the browser to surf to a different address without user action.
  • Mouse pointer: advertisements that try to entice the user to interact with, for example, a moving mouse pointer.
  • Malware or unwanted software: ads that promote, host or link malware to pages with malware.

Better ads

Google has been part of the Coalition for Better Ads for some time now. Within this partnership, companies jointly try to ensure that advertisements on the Internet are less annoying. That way, people should also be less inclined to block them.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.