Serious Bug in Chrome Store - Used for Spamming

[Ch Ext]

I am directly emailing you this since I did not want to mail the group and wanted others to take advantage of this bug. 

At present there is a limit of 45 characters on the title of the chrome extension, but this does does not extent to titles in other languages. This means that people are taking advantage of the language bug to stuff keywords into the title.

This seems to have a huge impact on ranking as the extension shows up for stuffed keyword in other languages. This is hugely affecting the different rankings.

If this is not taken care of, more and more people will start stuffing and the store search will become fully spammy.

Please immediately take care of this. 

I have also created a ticket for this: 7-1505000035826

In the ticket I have given example of extension that are doing spamming with this. 

[Patrick Kettner]

Thank you very much for reaching out. I am speaking to the store abuse team to investigate mitigations. 

best

Patrick

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[Ch Ext]

Thank you Patrick. Thank you for the reassurance. 

I see that there are many extensions out there that are using this bug to spam and manipulate the chrome store ranking. These are clear violation of the spam rules mentioned here: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/program-policies/spam-and-abuse 

Was wondering, if we report these extensions that does this, would actions be taken against these extensions including removal from the chrome store? It takes considerable time to check all languages for each extensions, so wanted to make sure if actions(including removal or banning author) will be taken if we report them. 

To give an example, this specific extension in Bulgarian language uses 4000+ characters in their title: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wame+91whatsapp-wepwhatsa/fhkimgpddcmnleeaicdjggpedegolbkb?hl=bg . This includes all possible keywords. They are also dominating the chrome store for most keywords because of this. Intentionally getting unfair advantages. 

So, wanted to make sure if actions would be taken against these extensions. Wanted to get your feedback before we put in considerable time to report other extensions. We have already reported some, now wanted to see if we can do more.

Regards

[Patrick Kettner]

Hello,

All reports are investigated by the team. Additionally, we are updating the validation code to catch this issue faster.

[Uladzimir Yankovich]

It would be cool to fix this.