
A Really Nasty Ad Slips Past Google - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/a-really-nasty-ad-slips-past-google/
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michael_dorfman
That's very nasty, indeed.

Why does Google allow advertisers to display a different URL than the one they
are sending people to?

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jraines
They don't. I've typo'd my destination URL and immediately got stopped because
it didn't match the display URL. Definitely some trickery afoot.

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axod
They certainly do. It's extremely common, and perfectly within their
guidelines. That's why they have 2 distinct fields, which are allowed to be on
different domains.

One reason is to allow ad-arbitrage, which is a massive part of adwords. (I
used to do a fair bit of this).

For example, you might want to show adverts that have the display URL of
apple.com but actually go through an ad networks own url before they get
there. Having the ad display a URL of an ad-network instead of apple.com would
be very silly.

You might also just want to put everything through your own jump script so you
can count clicks yourself to ensure google is honest.

From the adwords guidelines:

"Your display URL must accurately reflect the URL of the website you're
advertising. It should match the domain of your landing page so that users
will know which site they'll be taken to when they click on your ad."

The original ad here violates that requirement.

But certainly allowing a different destination URL to display URL is pretty
important for a lot of people who legitimately use adwords to drive traffic
through ad-networks or jump scrtips etc.

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ElbertF
They may have had a 301 redirect to the real Mozilla website and changed it
later, in case a Google employee would check the URL.

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vaksel
it's usually a lot more involved than that, very often even after the site
goes live, they still have the redirect in place, only it's limited to the ip
range for Mountain View California.

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gojomo
And I wonder: does Google staff its ad division with simpleminded trusting
folk who just fell off the turnip truck?

I have a friend who's reported blatant violations of the AdWords policies
against (1) sending people to a page full of other ads; and (2) ultimate
landing pages on very different domains than displayed.

He's sent screenshots. I can trivially reproduce what he's reported from my
home consumer DSL. But then after his report is forwarded around a bit at
Google, he just gets the response back, "we don't see that."

Gee, ya think maybe the scammers are identifying Google IPs and sending them
what they want to see?

Google even asked _him_ for an outside proxy they could use for testing!

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antirez
Apart from the url mismatch, is this illegal? I don't think so, they are
selling support for an opensource project. If this support is bad, not needed,
..., is more an ethical problem, but otherwise there is nothing wrong about
it.

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camccann
It may not be _illegal_ , but I'd be shocked if it wasn't a flagrant violation
of Google's terms of service and likely to get the advertiser's AdWords
account terminated with extreme prejudice.

"Illegal" and "nothing wrong" aren't an exhaustive set.

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cracki
what do you mean by "extreme prejudice"?

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NathanKP
Extreme prejudice doubtlessly means that after Google AdWords finished
terminating the scammers AdWords account they will probably also manually
adjust their search engine rankings to make sure that they never appear again
in any Google search. ;0

Messing with Google will get you totally banned.

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uuilly
I caught this a few weeks ago when I tried to install ffx on my girlfriend's
dad's laptop. Something smelled funny and I backed out without thinking much
of it. Never saw the $2.50 charge though. I've reported malicious ads to
google in the past and they took them down. Though that was for obscure
electronics not a major browser. I bet this is gone in less than 12 hours.

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ErrantX
Less - it's gone for me already.

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lupin_sansei
weirdly the url mentioned <http://firefox.mozilla-now.com/> now goes to
FileHippo's AVG Download page

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rapind
I don't think whoever owns the domain and is running the ad compaign is
actually the firefox support guys. If you take a look at the source it appears
they're loading sites in a frameset. So my guess is it's a referrer shop and
the site they're loading will change regularly.

And I don't know why I'm saying _they_ or _shop_ since it's no doubt one guy
collecting many small referral paychecks for a bunch of these.

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JDigital
This happened before, when Google Adsense paid $1 for anyone who installed
Firefox with Google Toolbar via an affiliate link. A clever chap ran ads
linking to a download page with his affiliate link.

