AdWords rulebreakers and a surprise

I know I had heard about this earlier, but today read-up on this news, as reported by Kelly Abner of Marketo: Google Updates Adwords Display URL Policy: “Starting April 1, Google is enforcing a new Display URL Policy. Not everyone knows about it, and those that do are wondering what it means.” Here’s the official word from Google, too.

Well basically, that little ‘display URL’ box when creating your AdWords ad must match the domain of the actual link URL. This has been done primarily to control affiliate marketers, but folks using outsourced landing pages are being affected, too. You can use a intermediate ‘tracking URL’ that doesn’t match, as long as the final ‘destination URL’ is the same domain.

I was a little surprised by the tracking URL allowance, as that depends on using a redirect, which I thought policy doesn’t allow. Obviously, it is an exception that is allowed as defined by Google.

Rulebreakers:
So I thought I’d go check on one of my major keywords because I knew there was one major advertiser already breaking the rules. His ad is still at or near the top, flaunting the rules, including:

1. Shill account: The URL displayed, and the whole account, I think, uses a shill domain. I suspect he got caught violating the rules at AdWords and had to create this separate account and domain to get back into the game.
2. Redirecting: The ads show the shill domain, but link to his regular domain. Whether he is directly violating this new policy or using a redirect, either way it is wrong.
3. All-caps: The domain URL is in all-caps. I know this is a no-no because I used some industry acronyms in an ad years ago and had my ads suspended due to all-caps.

Surprise:
While looking at the SERPs, I noticed most of the listed results were tagged as “competition”. Turns out that because I uploaded my bookmarks to my Google Account, they were showing what folder/tag those sites were in.

For a moment I thought Google knew a little too much about me! Maybe they still do. Now if they’d only get after my rule-breaking competitor.