My (unusual) last name as the header in an ad

What's going on?

[hunderdown]

I never expected to see an AdSense quirk on my niche content site, and one I haven't seen anything about here, either. But there it was.

In the #1 position in a wide skyscraper, an ad for a brand-name travel site--normal copy, normal URL--and my last name (Underdown) as the header! And travel is not the subject of my site. All the other ads in the block were on-topic. AND it's not as if my last name were Paris or Tahiti, either...

Anyone ever see anything like this? Since my last name is in my domain name (see my site in my profile, and if you visit and poke around, maybe you'll see one of these ads), I assume there's some connection there.

As further context I should mention that I am trying out different ad formats, and just uploaded the changed pages and saw this when I first checked them.

The best theory I can come up with is that this brand-name travel site, or an affiliate of it, is doing some ad spamming in a creative way, with the intention of building name recognition. And they are using domain names as keywords, with the domain names then inserted into the ads. They won't get a good CTR and will probably be shut down by AdWords, but before that happens they will appear all over the web.

Or is this some weird form of site targeting? But why would a travel site target my site?

?

[added--looking at the ad again, it does seem to be using my name as if it were a location--"find hotels in the area." So far as I know, however, my name is not used as a place name anywhere (no, not even in Australia, the Land Downunder , which led to one of my nicknames in middle school!)

[Frequent]

Doing what they are doing will not get them kicked unless you have copyrights to the name and you complain. Even then they won't get kicked but the keyword may be disabled.

It's pretty common to use urls as a keyword actually. (Or is it just me?)

Dynamically inserting the keyword probably gets them some great clickthrough and that is the only really questionable tactic as it could be misleading. They aren't using dynamic insertion of a true url as that would never get approved. Google will likely disable the keyword until they stop the dynamic insertion. To make this more likely, I'd fire of a complaint to Google.

Freq---

[norton j radstock]

I'm surprised that nobody is selling 'underdown' on ebay.

[kokaroach]

Not sure if this is relevant or not...

A lot of affiliate marketers use popular names of people and URL's to attract attention to their adwords ads. I just blocked an entire domain (where affiliates sign up to promote books in their "marketplace") using the competitive ad filter because affiliates were using the name "Bill Gates" in the headline, to advertise surveys and money making ebooks on my tech/consumer electronics site.

Some of the headlines were:

"Bill Gates Wealth Secrets" for the moneymaking book, and "Bill Gates Survey" for a book listing survey sites.

Now, my site has tech savvy visitors so naturally, mentioning Bill Gates in an ad will get attention, but when those people land on a hard-core direct response salesletter outlining how to make money on surveys, my guess is that the conversion rates will suck.

This would reflect on the overall impression my site makes to visitors if I allowed deceptive ads for non-relevant products.

Anyway, if your site is established in your niche and/or your name is popular in your industry and a lot of people search for it, they're probably affiliates of your competitors or competing affiliates in the same programs you are in.

K

[Rodney]

Adwords advertisers can use automatic keyword insertion into their ads as well.

So if your domain name was picked up as a keyword, it's possible it just showed that keyword in the ad. This might happen if another word on your page was remotely travel related.

So far as I know, however, my name is not used as a place name anywhere

There is a recreation place in Wisconsin with your last name.

[hunderdown]

Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I should clarify that when I said this will get "shut down," I just meant the campaign will be turned off or made really expensive or whatever it is that currently happens with very low CTR campaigns. I expect these ads, like other very off-topic ads on my site in the past, will simply disappear on their own in a day or two. If they don't, I'll block them.

I think that Rodney's info. that there is a recreation place with my name, coupled with Freq's thoughts on how they could match the ads to domain names, probably explains what happened. This is not a competitor in even the broadest sense. It''s the travel site trying to match to local content on the basis of domain name.

And I'll be sure to watch for "buy underdown on ebay"! So long as it's not "used underdown" I won't mind....

[Leva]

Check the code on your HTML.

Your HTML may have your last name inserted as the author if you're using an html editor rather than doing it by hand. I've seen a few editors that do this automatically.

Depending on how googlebot reads code, it could conceivably pick this name up and think it found a match.

If the name of the travel-agency is "underdown" I could conceivably see them using that as a legitimate keyword, on the off chance that someone was discussing Underdown Travel in a forum or on a website.

Leva

[hunderdown]

The ads are already gone.

But now I've learned about the Underdown Recreation Area in Wisconsin. Worth a trip just to take a picture of the family standing by a sign!