When Adwords guys go wrong

this is a pretty obvious case

[ownerrim]

I just found a site that claims to have info on various types of attorney assistance. But when you click on a page for an area of law, the ONLY thing you see is:

Searches for <keywords> in <US state> include:

no text just two leaderboards of adsense

I found the site through an adwords placement. Am I the only one who thinks this is bogus?

[edited by: Jenstar at 10:56 pm (utc) on Dec. 29, 2004]
[edit reason] Sorrry, no "outting" of publishers with specifics [/edit]

[hyperkik]

You've found one? I've seen dozens. Some of which are pretty flagrant in their violation of the TOS (e.g., you click to a promised page of "articles", see an "articles" heading, and the only "content" offered is an AdSense ad block.)

[beren]

There are many sites like this. I don't think Google much cares.

[ownerrim]

well, I've seen plenty of scraper sites, but, actually, this is the first TOS violater I've seen that was this blatant. guess i don't surf enough

[richmondsteve]

In my opinion, it tarnishes the program by giving current and prospective advertisers a poorer perception of publishers and users a poorer perception of AdSense. And though debatable, it likely lowers publishers' ROI on averge.

On a handful of occasions, I've pointed blatantly offending publishers to the appropriate part of the AdSense TOS before, being polite and giving them the benefit of the doubt, but reporting them to Google if they didn't remedy the situation, allowing more time to do so if they replied and weren't completely rude. More often than not, the publisher rectified the situation and it was rectified part of the rest of the time after contacting Google, though I have no way of knowing if Google contacted the publishers.

Not everyone agrees with going this route, but you're welcome to do the same.

[ownerrim]

"More often than not, the publisher rectified the situation"

I guess this publisher could bring himself into compliance. But he would have to take the awful step of writing actual content for his page. It's a pity this publisher is so lazy because his pages don't look bad as far as aesthetics go.

I'd like to report him, but I have a no-rat policy that I try to stick to.

[markus007]

One of my friends has a site selling tickets for events. He was doing a lot of PPC and discouvered a adsense spam site was sending him 1,000 clicks a day via PPC. ie Adsense banners, bunch of redudent spam text and that was it.

The most annoying spammers are those that take the links from adsense and just redirect via them. Ie they create a directory listing of links, where each link is a redirection through a googlesydication link. ie the ads are never shown but they are given credit for it. I think they get away with it because they are signed up under 3rd party sites like tribal fusion.