All these ads point to a well known affiliate travel program. As google is slow to approve (or delete) these ads they are now preventing top performing ads to show on the left (top 2 spots).
This slow response costs loads of advertisers loss in traffic and sales. As a top paying advertiser I simply expect top notch service from google. It is that simple.
It cannot be the advertisers responsibility to point out malicious ad campaigns. Is google addressing this? The same happened In January this year, obviously no fixes have been put in place since then.
[edited by: eWhisper at 12:12 pm (utc) on April 24, 2006]
[edit reason] Please don't post specifics. [/edit]
The ads are there and since about an hour they have increased. Have called the lovely people that represent google and it seemed to be news to them. They didnt have any idea what I meant when i was talking about the january / februaru incident and I had to explain all from the start again. I did get a lovely unique reply which was: We will look into it. I am now awaiting my non standard reply email that has non duplicated content ( Google hates that) back as per usual.
I suspect that he is using stolen credit card info to finance this, after all he is bidding for most (world wide) travel destinations (destination+hotels). He is always bidding top rank.
The owner of the domain is registered under a Turkish address. Not easy to track though, as he uses loads of domains, for most the WHOis info is cloaked.
I suspect stolen credit cards are used to pay google (nice number of disputes are heading googles way), booker then books hotel rooms with affiliate. Turkish guy gets the affiliate commission (probably send by cheque). Risky but workable.
Point is that this guy costs advertisers loss of exposure and revenue. He also exposes the google system as highly vulnerable as obviously they can't do much about this.
This is an exact repeat of what happened in January this year. Same guy posted loads of domains, oddly enough all similar in name and forwarded the traffic to two main travel affiliate programs.
Question is, why would he do this? He apparently runs an affiliate program, hence the direct forwarding. At commissions of 5% and monies paid out after the service has been rendered (i.e. client checked out), I don't think that would pay for google ads (most ads rank top 1-3 under some of the travel worlds busiest keyword combinations).
But regardless the 'how', what surfaces here is the inability of google to avoid this (now) repeat scenario. And one can't blame them for not spotting this. After all each ad is posted under a new domain, and probably paid for with a different credit card.
