Multiple ads with same landing page

[PeteM]

I've noticed an increase in multiple ads, with the same landing page, for a given search term. They're all affiliate ads and the display URL's are as follows.....

www.mysite.co.uk
www.mysite.uk.com
www.mysite.com/uk

All resolve to www.mysite.co.uk.

I've queried this with Google and their reply is...

"I have reviewed the three 'search term' sites in question
and have confirmed that they do lie within acceptable Google policy as they do not go through a third party redirect."

My understanding is that this is breaking Google double serving policy but I cant see which rule is being broken.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Pete

[Rehan]

Pete, I've posted about this previously and I recently pinged one of the AdWords rep about it as well. Apparently their policy team is currently taking a look at the issue and will hopefully make a decision about it soon.

[poster_boy]

The Google display URL policies are:

* Indicate who owns the destination URL, but does not need to match the actual destination URL of the landing page exactly.
* Appear to be a viable website address. It must include the appropriate extension such as '.com,' '.net,' and 'co.uk,' but 'www' and 'http://' are not required.
* Represent a website. The display URL also cannot be an email address. For example, '[e-mail]' would not be allowed.
* Comply with editorial policy, which will be discussed in later topics.

Do the URL variations actually work if typed into a browser? If no, then they violate rule #2.

Even if they do work, IMHO, duplicating sites on multiple domains purely for the purpose of bidding on multiple ads should be a violation of policy - but I, unfortunately, can't find any specific rule that prohibits it.

[PeteM]

The URL's are not valid. I have sent another email to Google pointing this out.

Cheers, Pete

[idolw]

is that this big company that spends $2M a month with adwords?
i see one of those companies in hotel industry in europe. major company has sth in common with prices. they take up to 4 spots per SERP.

[biking4jesus]

I have had past experience with this running our affiliate program. I begun to have affiliates bidding on Google keywords and they were butchering our company name/brand in their display url. I had to clearly state that they could not use any variation of our display url in their keyword ads.

What you would need to find out is perhaps this affiliate is running 3 different accounts using some kind of alias or other client accounts so that they can obtain multiple ads on the same page.

[admagix]

One of my client's affiliate was also using the clients domain with few changes by including "-",.net etc... and was competing with the client itself. Now, the client have asked all of his affiliates not to use PPC campaigns to generate traffic.

As the previous poster said - this might be an affiliate having multiple domains.

[deep_alley]

This happens often enough and it is pretty annoying.
Googles double standards...