How To Test Your Site For Compliance With The Better Ads Standard

We written several articles about Google Chrome Canary and their new Better Ads Standard ad blocking which will appear on February 15, 2018.

If you received an email from Google, or notification in your Webmaster tools console saying that you have a failing ad experience, you will be punished soon, when Google releases its new browser.

The new browser, Google Chrome 64, or Canary, will be blocking essentially all ads on your website until you have passed the ad experience tests.

In this article, we will look at how you can debug your site with the latest version of Chrome, so you can prepare for the new requirements from Google.

Testing Your Site For Chrome Canary Ad Blocking

Chrome Canary is expected to be released tomorrow, January 23, 2018, although the blocker for the Better Ads Standard will not be enabled immediately.

So how do you enable the new ad blocker and find out if your site is being blacklisted? It's actually not that hard.

Once January 23 rolls around all you have to do is install the new version of Chrome, and then set it up to enable the ad blocking.

Here's how you do that on Windows:

1. Download the new version of Chrome (after January 23)
2. Go to the Chrome Canary link in the start menu, and click More -> Open File Location
3. This will give you the shortcut. Right click on the shortcut and copy what's in the Target field (it should be something like "C:\Users\VVVVV\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\chrome.exe").
4. Open a command prompt window and type that followed by the following: -enable-features='SubresourceFilter,SubresourceFilterExperimentalUI,AbusiveExperienceEnforce' The entire command will then be something like: C:\Users\VVVVV\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome SxS\Application\chrome.exe" -enable-features='SubresourceFilter,SubresourceFilterExperimentalUI,AbusiveExperienceEnforce'
5. You will then see if it's blocking ads. If it isn't blocking ads, but you still want to see what would happen if it did block ads, there's a setting in Developer Tools which allows you to force ad blocking on a certain page.

Once you have done this, you'll be able to see if you're on Google's blacklist, and your ads are being blocked by the browser.

Violating Ad Experience Notice From Google

If you get a "Violating Ad Experience" notice, either via email or via the web console, you will need to do something to mollify Google before they start blocking all of your ads.

For some ridiculous reason, Google thinks that it's appropriate to block all of the ads on your site if some of them don't meet the standard.

We have an entire article on what to do if you get a "Violating Ad Experience" notice from Google here, but the most important point is that you must remove the ads immediately, and resubmit, as it will take several days (perhaps, weeks) before Google stops blocking ads on your site again.

After you've passed Google's manual testing, you can go back and put ads back on your site (but do it carefully, since you will eventually be reviewed again).