Adwords Spam on Google.com?

[SBMarketing]

Has anyone noticed a huge increase in Adwords Listing spam on Google.com?

There's one particular company I've noticed a great deal of what appears to be Adwords listing spam. A Whois, shows it as a German company.

From what I've seen so far, they have several domains, but each domain seems to share the exact same product database with very similar site layouts. Each domain seems to be MTA and they seem to be bidding on hundreds of thousands of keywords.

With Google's recent organic algorithm changes, do you think there has been an increase in Adwords spam? Has anyone noticed this?

[Eschatonic]

Well, depends what form this spam takes, and whether it's really spam or a legitimate business model.

Amazon, for example, bids on thousands of keywords, but you wouldn't call them "spammy". Even linking to different domains is not really a problem because ultimately as long as the company only has a single ad in the listings, then they're only hurting their own SEO/branding efforts.

If they're appearing for unrelated keywords or their site is poor quality, then they'll suffer for it on their own terms by having a low QS/low CTR, which will mean that they're spending too much money and other advertisers should easily be able to outbid them.

[SBMarketing]

I'm sorry, I forgot to add that each of their domains is showing for the same search term, with near exact copies of ads. So if you searched for "red widget" they might have 3-5 ads show all at the same time - the only major difference between each ad is the domain they point to.

[Eschatonic]

In that case, it's against Google's ToS. You should be able to report them for that, and hopefully they'll be removed from the listings. Here's a link to the report page:

[adwords.google.com...]

[RhinoFish]

client calls me, says he got a call from a company that showed him how they can get him to the top of google... turns out, he downloaded their "presentation", a browser plugin, then they showed them their magic ability to get him to the top. i explained he is on the top of the listings, but only on his computer.

point is, make sure your computer's clean - the scenario you described isn't something i usually see in the ads, smells unusual.