SEO is constantly dogged by headlines highlighting bad practises and it is quite rare that you hear about a bad Adword campaign. I think this has more to do with SEO being a long term achievement that’s slow to recover, rather than a yes or no approval that can be switched on and off.

That’s not to say that bad Adwords practises aren’t highlighted. A recent report from Google showed that they removed 350 million adverts from their systems last year. Here’s a quote from Mike Hochberg who is the Director of Ads Engineering at Google:

We’ve allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

As you can see, they’re taking it seriously and with 350 million ads removed last year, they seem to be doing a good job.

Here’s a list of the worst offenders for Bad Ads:

Counterfeit goods: 14,000 advertisers banned for trying to sell these.
Illegal online pharmacies: 2 million ads removed.
Copyright infringement: 5,000 AdSense accounts disabled for violating copyright.
Tech support scams: 4,000 AdWords accounts removed.
Malware: 400,000 ads disabled from sites hiding malware.
Get rich quick schemes: 10,000 ads disabled for sites promoting these.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey