New URL Policy Being Enforced on Old Ads

Might be affecting just some accounts

[SuperF]

We have many thousands of ads, promoting hundreds of merchants, and have been doing so for many years...

Consequently we must have accumulated a few typos in Display URLs, or merchants have changed where the affiliate link leads.

Today Google's new software (well it looks like software, and smells like software, but Google tend to maintain that everything gets checked by a human) has started unearthing all of our old False Display URLs (which the Google humans never picked up on).

This is good. It means:

- we are finding ads that no longer go where they should
- our "evil" competitors will get all their bad ads disapproved

The software has made the odd false negative, but otherwise doing great.

(could be it's just a trial run, and our account is one of the guinea pigs - for there hasn't been an announcement)

[edited by: SuperF at 2:14 pm (utc) on May 2, 2008]

[directwheels]

it hit me on a number of ads too yesterday.

[smallcompany]

Great news if true. I still see some of the old timers. Sure, it may take some time for the system to go through all accounts. It may also happen that some will get missed.
Still, if it’s working that automated way, that should be it – finally.

[Rehan]

Looks like they may have finally automated it for new ads, too. The test ad I created on April 1 is still running, but when I created another identical one it was disapproved in about 5 minutes.

May is the new April. :)