Users and advertisers skeptical about Google’s URL policy

Following up on our previous article, Google display URL policy, where the display URL must match the destination URL, well, its been finally put into practice early days this month. However, there’s been a lot of controversy behind this whole issue.

On one hand, we have the advertisers who have been naively punched proceeding this new policy, specially those who have invested a lot of time and money into campaigns and have diligently established a brand for themselves overtime. Then, and this is the downside, we have advertisers, or better said, merciless spammers, who create ads that display your URL, except instead of landing on your site, it redirects you to some random, irrelevant page.

Basically, all the hard work and dedication on behalf of advertisers is systematically going down the drain due to scams such as these. It can slowly ruin your brand’s reputation due to landing page inconsistency but most importantly, it can empty your pockets. Though we’re not talking about anything new here, spammers have been around since Internet’s early days, but this time its being taken a bit far into working around the new Google policy. Its tricking Google into believing all policy standards are being met, when in fact, its all a facade.

As this blogger explains, ‘this could quickly get a lot worse, if they team up with phishing sites that look and feel like your own site. Using such a man-in-the-middle attack, they could steal your customers’ credit card numbers, SSNs, and login information.’ This is entering forbidden territory which could cause imminent death of your brand.

What could happen next? Advertisers and users will begin distrusting the search engine colossus; advertisers will stop running Adwords campaigns and users will double take before they perform their next click. ouch! Better put a stop on this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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