Google Makes It Easier to Report Counterfeiters in AdSense

Google's bread and butter is still its advertising business and it's no surprise that it wants to keep as safe as possible. While Google would be happy to take most people's money for ads, it's increasing efforts to weed out counterfeiters, if only to stave off brands coming down hard on Google for this.

Google says it's already doing quite a lot to keep counterfeiters out and it's efforts have been paying off. However, those that would abuse the system don't give up easily, so Google has to constantly upgrade its weapons and approaches.

It's done just that with a number of new policies and tools which should result in cleaner AdSense ads.

"With over one million advertisers using AdWords in over 190 countries, how do we weed out the bad actors who violate our clear policies against advertising counterfeits?," asks Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Google.

"In the last six months of 2010 alone, we shut down approximately 50,000 AdWords accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods. But there’s no silver bullet here. Instead, it’s a cat-and-mouse game, where we are constantly working to improve our practices and tune our systems to keep out the bad guys," he explained.

Google is rolling out three improvements which are mostly aimed at making it easier for genuine brands to report fakes in the ads. The first is a promise to act on complaints faster, Google is aiming at a 24 hour average response time, for brands that don't abuse the system, i.e. are not overly aggressive in their complaints.

The second improvement is more vigilantly reviewing what third party sites are doing and whether the sites link to counterfeit goods in which case Google will terminate all dealings with them.

Finally, Google is introducing a new help center page to help companies report counterfeiters. Google hopes that these steps will increase activity from companies affected by counterfeiters since, so far, Google's own detection algorithms account for 95 percent of all accounts removed.