1) Doesn’t Google check for duplicate domains before it serves the ads?
2) If I clicked on all four ads would Google give the site credit for only one click since my IP address is recorded?
I did click on all four ads and it was definitely the same site. So they are forcing other relevant sites off the first page by hogging all the top spots.
Shady.
widget.com/1.html
widget.com/2.html
widget.com/3.html
widget.com/4.html
can you clarify.
I dont understand what "Some of them should have 'Affiliate' or 'aff' at the end of their ad. Or, quite possibly, they could be different TLD's of the same domain name"
If a site is an affiliate site it is required to state this in the actual adword. That's why you'll sometimes see ads with 'affiliate' or 'aff' in the actual advert on the Google search results page.
Different top level domains:
You can often see two adwords for the same domain if you're doing a search from say Australia - you might get widget.com and widget.com.au. Widget.com might be advertising to all countries and all languages and widget.com.au may be targeting just Australian users.
Domains.:
Keep in mind that the domain displayed in the actual ad doesn't have to have anything to do with the destination URL. You can display whatever you want there - so it could be displaying widget.com but actually clicking through to widgetsforless.com.
Also - even if they all click through to the same domain they may have some sort of unique tracking ID appended to them to identify which affiliate sent the click through to the site - in this way they can have the same destination URL as well.
CompanyX may have an affiliate program.
Each affiliate of CompanyX can place an ad for companyX.
In order to do this they must identify themselves as an affiliate.
This is done by putting Aff, Affiliate, Distributor, Partner, or something similar in the ad.
So any company could sign up as their own affiliate for strategic purposes or have their cousin sign up and dominate the adword results. Please clarify if my assumption is wrong.
I did go back and check and all the click through domains are the same, with different landing pages, but two did say "aff" at the end of the ad and two did not.
Like a consumer would really know what that meant.
Thanks so much : )
Upon further review the third site does say “distributor”.
It is worded "Same day distributor" Now that is cleaver.
Wow I really do learn a lot here. I can’t believe I didn’t know this already.
