I'm surprised of the negativity towards this action, but I guess I shouldn't be. A lot of you are in a very different situation than me and this will affect you directly. However, warning people away from being potentially tricked by these deceptive ads is a very good thing.
Tons of sites out there that turn a blind eye to such ads and that's bad. Yes, there will be some unfortunate pain for sites that responsibly attempt to block these ads as they come up. Assuming the blog post is correct and Google has implemented this correctly, it should be minimal for those sorts of folks since they claim the penalty will only occur if users are consistently getting social engineering ads. (I suspect Google will ratchet up the rate over time though, assuming these ads become less common as a result of this and similar efforts).
EDIT: See below. I'm convinced and with y'all now. Google--this is a step in the right direction and I support this action, but you do need to get your own house in order too!
> I'm surprised of the negativity towards this action
Its pretty basic. A lot of people are not happy that Google is serving these ads that they are telling you they will stop at the browser-level with a warning that makes the site owner look guilty. They want Google's Ad network to stop serving the ads in the first place.
So can anyone point me to an ad served by Google that is as bad as the examples in the blog post? I thought Google had previously cracked down on such ads from the serving side too, although less deceptive ones were still allowed, no? I'm happy to be better informed!
Gotcha. Yeah, I see one there. Big green button with a down arrow saying "GET IT NOW" lots of whitespace below and then a smallish rewaterpressure logo. Because of the whitespace, the button very much looked associated with the paint.net download text above, not with the rewaterpressure logo below.
I also received the less bad (but still bad) text-based "start download now" one the same page. You convinced me. Editing my parent post above.
EDIT: for those curious, here's what the page looked like on the page load mentioned above: http://imgur.com/SisOXNT
I feel like something needs to be done about these sort of ads, I'm happy the Chrome/SafeBrowsing teams are taking these steps. But it's so hypocritical, because most of the times I see these ads, it's from Google's network!
I'm not happy that they punish the publisher/webmaster with no accountability for the advertiser or ad network. I can use Google's AdSense on my website, and unless I continually make an effort to manually review ads, it's very likely it will begin display these sorts of ads. And then because AdSense doesn't care, Chrome will begin flagging my website as malicious to users?!?
I'm surprised they're not doing this as well as making an effort to purge these sorts of ads from AdSense. That way, I could feel comfortable that my users aren't being shown scummy ads, which would be a huge advantage over other ad networks. Now instead, running ads on a website will either become a liability, or an extra added effort to make sure I don't get screwed over by Google.
Also, while a noble goal, there's no details of how they detect and classify these ads. I've had an entire Domain flagged and blocked off by SafeBrowsing because a single page on a subdomain was displaying an ad (via DoubleClick) which linked to malware.
> I'm surprised of the negativity towards this action
I'm not. This site is filled with grey-hat folks who would do anything to make a buck on the web. I mean, it's a forum hosted by/affiliated with a VC firm, and look at the comments here. A bunch of people angry that google would dare do this, because they might/will be targeted. People were also pissed when Google stopped using meta keywords, and when they stopped reading text that was made invisible in CSS, and really any grey- or black-hat way to get more visitors/ad impressions.
Tons of sites out there that turn a blind eye to such ads and that's bad. Yes, there will be some unfortunate pain for sites that responsibly attempt to block these ads as they come up. Assuming the blog post is correct and Google has implemented this correctly, it should be minimal for those sorts of folks since they claim the penalty will only occur if users are consistently getting social engineering ads. (I suspect Google will ratchet up the rate over time though, assuming these ads become less common as a result of this and similar efforts).
EDIT: See below. I'm convinced and with y'all now. Google--this is a step in the right direction and I support this action, but you do need to get your own house in order too!