MFA site using my site's URL in their ads

WHY are they doing this?

[Leva]

Major software maker in existence for the last four-five years has: www.widget.com

I have owned www.widget.ORG since the mid 1990's. It's a distinct site with plenty of unique content unrelated to Major Software Maker though I have some tasteful and mutually beneficial advertising for said Software Maker on my site. Hey, I'm not stupid. *grin*

MFA site is www.widget.other.tld. HOWEVER, their adwords ads show MY site's URL of www.widget.org -- but a click sends you to THEIR site. They're a scammy, obnoxious MFA site with tons of annoying advertising. I suspect the reason they're showing MY site's URL is that it "looks" like the official URL for the Major Software Maker but it's not trademarked by them like their actual domain name is.

I do NOT appreciate THEIR ads showing MY site's URL. People are going to think we're associated. This is particularly true since I'm about to launch an advertising campaign of my own; I'm on the last leg of approval for Adsense API for user-generated content.

Is there anything I can do about this? Will Adsense do anything if I complain?

[Kobayashi]

You can report the ad to AdWords mentioning that you think the ad is in violation of their policy that requires the display URL to match the final destination URL. If the ad just started to appear it will probably be disapproved for the same reason once it is reviewed but if it has been running for awhile it may have slipped through. It has always bothered me that they do not validate ads for this policy in real time when it is submitted.

[edited by: Kobayashi at 7:02 am (utc) on July 31, 2007]

[AdWordsAdvisor2]

Leva,

As Kobayashi mentions, this sounds like it's a pretty straightforward violation of our policies. If the ad hasn't already been disapproved, just let AdWords support know and they will take care of it.

AWA2

[Tastatura]

Consider this scenario for a reason this person might be doing it (just a guess though):
-Let's say that the ad with your URL shows up on some site
-webmaster of that site checks what kind of ads show up on his/hers pages, and decides to check URL (it's 'visible' on Adsense Ad so he/she types it in - no clicking :) )
-He/she realizes that it's a spammy site and decides to put the URL in competitive ad filter to block ads from this domain
-Guess what, webmaster just blocked your domain instead of real spammy one. spamer continues to spam...
(....again just a thought...)

[Leva]

AWA2,

Thanks. I contacted Adwords support with all the needed information to find the ad.

Got a response back ... asking for information that he could have figured out from the first e-mail I sent, which was real encouraging ... I sent a response back using smaller words. Hopefully this will be taken care of soon. :-)

Tatsura -- yes, that's a distinct possibility. This guy's advertising a download of the application in question that hasn't been released yet, and isn't actually what you get when you download from his site. On the flip side, because people assume widget.org is owned by the software maker, people may not look too closely. The software maker is one of the good guys and is rather popular -- they get lots of free advertising and few people would ban their ads unless someone realized it wasn't them with the ad. (Which may also be why they're using my URL -- nobody would ban it because it looks very legit.)

[edited by: Leva at 2:52 pm (utc) on Aug. 1, 2007]