Google says that in 2016, the company took down 1.7 billion ads that violated its advertising policies, more than double the amount of bad ads we took down in 2015.

Those "bad"ads are those considered by Google's advetising team as misleading, inappropriate, or harmful.

Last year, Google expanded its policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers. For example, in July Google introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users. In the six months since launching this policy, Google disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads. Second, the company beefed up its technology so it can spot and disable bad ads even faster.

According to Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management Sustainable Ads, Google took the following actions during 2016:

• Took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.
• Disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.
• Took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.
• Took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
• Google systems also detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on its platforms, a huge increase year over 2015.

In 2016, Google also saw the rise of tabloid cloakers, a new type of scammer that tries to game our system by pretending to be news. Cloakers often take advantage of timely topics-a government election, a trending news story or a popular celebrity - and their ads can look like headlines on a news website. But when people click on that story about Ellen DeGeneres and aliens, they go to a site selling weight-loss products, not a news story.

To fight cloakers, Google take down the scammers themselves, and prevents them from advertising again. In 2016, Google suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking.

Here are some examples of common policy violations Google saw among bad sites in 2016:

• Google took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
• Google took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.
• And Google suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.