How Are They Doing This?

Manipulating Relevancy?

[luke175]

I see ads for a couple of "make money" sites on Google Adwords in totally unrelated searches.

For hyopthetical example, I search for "blue widgets" and see an ad for this money making opportunity.

Now, I've tried advertising some products in other complimentary niches but thanks to Google's "relevancy" software the minimum bid is always around $5.

So today just out of curiosity I duplicated one of these ads- title, link, text- everything- just to see what sort of bid Google would give me.

It was $10 per click!

So how are these people getting around this?

[goodroi]

That is the amount you pay at the beginning. If you have a high CTR that PPC will drop. Also dont forget some of these ads are loss leaders and the companies are more concerned about market share and long term goals.

[bostonseo]

"If you have a high CTR that PPC will drop"

Not necessarily.

[sore66]

Do you really want to know?

Do you have a black hat?

[jtara]

They might be cloaking. Giving one version of the landing page to the Google spider, and a different version to users.

Easy enough to check. Set your user-agent to the appropriate spider. (Google has a different spider for Adwords.) The Firefox "User Agent Switcher" extension would come in handy. Visit the site with your user-agent set to make you look like the Google spider.

If you find that they are showing widgets to the spider, but wadgets to everyone else, report them.