Abusive experience status: Failing (Google)
 

Is anyone else having similar issues with Google?

I received an "Abusive experience status: Failing" report in December I tried to fix it but ended up just removing popups for a few weeks (I could not figure out what they wanted it was very unclear), then 3 weeks after I enabled them again I got another report.

I had no ads on scrollbars, play buttons, next arrows, close or navigation links, the recorded video shows them clicking on a thumbnail which opens a popup (+ the page of the thumbnail).

It looks like they are targeting popups in general, you can also report sites to them and one of the options is just "popup".

I was following all the common rules:
- 1 popup per 24 hours
- attached to click event (not on navigation links, or on white space, or automatically after a timer)
- skip the first x clicks
- contents of the popups had all the "bad" ads disabled. (virus warnings etc etc, "google safe")
- I tested both tabup and tabunder

Whatever I tried they return with status failing. I talked to a few ad networks and they told me other publishers are reporting the same issues and are switching to interstitials.

Is this the for popups? (on Chrome)

we were having the same problem the last few months, abusive experience status was going back and forth between passing and failing, sometimes without us making any changes

we've been passing for at least a month now, the only changes we made were removing externally-linked nav tabs, and we switched to a different ad network for popunders

Its possible that your pop code looks more suspicious to google than other ad networks. specifically: you said you set the pop to be google compliant, but 1) there might be malicious landers coming from other publishers with that ad network -- so google might see that whole adnetwork as being more suspicious (even though you set your pop code to google compliant landers) and 2) every ad network offering self-serve ads suffers from malicious advertisers, who make new accounts and cloak their landers to get around the ad networks guidelines. So if you're with a self-serve platform, your site *will* be showing malicious landers sometimes, even if you strictly forbid it.

So, definitely take a look into other possible popup networks. There *are* some that will never show a malicious lander -- specifically, ones that don't offer self-serve campaigns.

Its also possible someone is reporting you (and us), trying to hurt your business. not much you can do about that other than disable pops for a few weeks, get passing status, and then put the popunder back up. if its someone with malicious intent reporting you, they will get bored eventually, same as anyone DDoS-ing your site.

if any of your nav tabs leads to an external site, definitely remove those links.

Thanks for the feedback, I will try running a single ad network (I have been running adspyglass for ages). But if it was the ads themself I would expect something else than "Misleading Site Behavior" more like "Social Engineering (Phishing and Deceptive Sites)" or "Malware or Unwanted Software".

I had no pop triggers on navigation links, only internal and in the end I only ran them on thumbnails / video titles.

After reading some more I found this:

So worst case the popups/ads are down for a day while testing what exactly is triggering this. (im at 2 fails now both with 2 reviews). I initially though that after 4 fails ads would be blocked for a month..

adspyglass could be the problem, especially if you're using their SSP option. you're showing pops from multiple self-serve ad networks, and we know that even if you're only using a single self-serve ad network there will be malicious landers sneaking through.

it is strange that it says "misleading behavior" instead of malware or phishing, but the reason could easily be that your site is doing the "misleading behavior" and isn't specifically responsible for the malware/phishing (since thats on a different domain)

I try to think about: what would attract google's attention to do a review of your site? Certainly an externally linked nav tab would draw attention to your site.

It wouldn't be hard for google to notice that people are ending up on malware/phishing sites after visiting your site, which could easily trigger a review -- and during the review, the most obvious violation is the popunders, which are misleading but not necessarily leading to malware/phishing, since 98% of the time, the pop is leading to a compliant lander (so they likely wouldn't see the malware/phishing lander during review)

You make some very valid points. I will set that up tomorrow (no SSP and maybe one trusted network directly) and see if that works. I will share results here so everyone can benefit from it. Thanks for brainstorming with me.

I might be wrong but I think even 1 popup per 24 hours isn't allowed anymore.

Only Full interstitials are allowed.

Maybe it's because of the pirated content on your shitty site...

I will do a lot of test in the coming weeks/months, if I have any success I will report back.

Yep. Interstitials only for Chrome users.