FindWhat ads are showing up in Google organic SERPs

This may not last long...

[boylan13]

FindWhat advertisers might be noticing a little boost in traffic right about now. I just noticed that some of our FindWhat ads for particular keywords are actually showing up in the Google organic results! Somehow a site called searchbrowser.com has managed to convert FindWhat PPC ads into pages that Googlebot has found, indexed and likes very much!

Example - search Google for "business intelligence" - the #2, #3 and #4 organic results (APPLIX, Information Builders and Investigation.com) are currently FindWhat ads served by searchbrowser.com. How FindWhat or its partner was able to get Googlebot to index paid ads as real content is astonishing but for now, FindWhat advertisers may be seeing a huge leap in traffic to their sites at a much lower per-click cost than AdWords...

-Chris

[boylan13]

Note: As of 5:17 PM Thursday (Eastern Time), results for this specific search are alternating between the old "pure" organic results and these "tainted" results. So the new index has not propagated through the Google server farm yet.

One way you can tell the FindWhat ads from real pages is that the FindWhat ads in the Google organic results do not have the "Cached" or "Similar Pages" links.

[edited by: rogerd at 1:52 am (utc) on Nov. 12, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs please... [/edit]

[mathguy]

This isn't really new. I have seen Findwhat ads listed on static pages in the past. Generally I have found those page to be of little value though because they tend to be on pretty spammy pages. 3-4 months ago I had some of my Findwhat ads listed on several spammy widget sites that had created a bunch of pages grouped by keyword that only listed the top ads for each keyword. I complained to Findwhat and I just got a boilerplate response stating that these sites weren'tt doing anything wrong. Given that none of the sites had anything to do with my site I really doubt any of the clicks I was billed for were legitimate but Findwhat doesn't seem to care.

[boylan13]

No, this was completely new. I've seen the spam pages you're talking about before with lame optimized content pages stacked with ads but this was a single organic Google listing per FindWhat ad showing up as if they were actual organic pages in Google. Each individual FindWhat ad showed up as if it were a real content page. Title and description exactly matched the FindWhat ads, and these displaced legitimate SERPs in the results.

I tried posting this same message in the moderated Google forum, but looks like it did not pass the moderators. I can only assume that someone from Google saw my post before it went live, or found this problem on their own and got it corrected quickly. It would be very embarassing to Google to have paid ads showing up indistinguishable from organic listings, particularly since google wasn't making any money on these ads.

I posted links to screen caps in my second post so people could see what this looked like, but a moderator deleted them because they were off-site URLs.

Is there any acceptable way to post links or screen images in a post so I can show you guys what I'm talking about?

Thanks,

-Chris