I just found this video over on David Olsen’s blog, and just could not pass without commenting. But I am doing so on my own blog instead, since the comment itself may be some what lengthy. While I appreciate the good intention of the author of this video, if you are a small budget PPC advertiser (like myself) Google does give a thing about you. While personally I would not mind if my ads would appear on these sites, as long as they provide real traffic I am fine with it. They make money, hopefully I make some conversions in sales and every one is happy.
From time to time you will come across a site like this one (PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ANY ADS ON THE SITE, IT WILL COST SOME ONE’S MONEY), and if you have a content ads enabled in your AdWords account you may end up getting suspiciously high volume of traffic from this website. As I did about 5 months ago. This website delivered about 600 “visitors” to one of my landing pages in 10 minutes and not even one of those visitors ended up on my merchant’s website. To fix the situation I have “excluded” the domain to prevent them to show my ads. Do you think it helped? Well, it did not. I stopped the campaign and as good citizen reported the problem to AdWords, without even asking for a refund. To my astonishment I received a reply that contained following:
Hello Vlad,
Thank you for your email regarding clicks from www.imageshack.com. I have
verified that you successfully excluded this site from your content
network bids.Currently some parked domain sites such as www.imageshack.com are
classified as being part of the search network in addition to the content
network and are not currently excludable through the site exclusion tool
(since that is for content sites)…..
Since when WWW.IMAGESHACK.COM (PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ANY ADS ON THE SITE, IT WILL COST SOME ONE’S MONEY) had become part of Google search network?!!!! I thought only AOL and ASK.COM and few others are in so called search network? IMAGESHACK? Have you heard of them? Please tell me you have!!! Because I never have.
This took place around the time when many AdWords advertisers woke up one morning and saw their prices go from $.10 to $10 overnight. What an irony?!
I have almost forgotten about the incident if it was not for this video. After watching the video I have decided to see if Imageshack.com is still serving content/search ads from Google. Evidently so!!! But they seam to have begun preying on Yahoo as well. So, go ahead be a good citizen report them. I did, with no success. Make sure you are spending at least $10,000 a month on Google AdWords, if you want to be heard.
So here is simple advise to affiliates. Stay away from content search on Google unless you will be serving banner ads. The shady websites like IMAGESHACK are not likely to serve banner ads, while with text ads they at least pretend to have content. Stick to search, and in some cases you should even stick to exclusively Google search, since you never know what other SHACKS are in the search network. But for sure do yourself a favor and exclude http://www.imageshack.com .
thanks for the head up on sites like this vlad…
You welcome Mark. I really suspected the site either was using click-bot, but I had absolutely no prove since the mentioned 600 clicks came from 50 us states or something like that.
Damn I was 2 minutes away from finishing the video when I accidentally closed the window.
Anyway, considering how domain parking is profitable enough to Google, I don't suppose they will remove them anytime soon.
The sames with those 1.0 arbitrage sites. They're practically everywhere and although they are infriging on Google's TOS, why do we still constantly see them around?
I suppose it's an evil we have to learn live with. But again, it would be much different if some big time AdWords advertiser woudl raise an issue. Not us little guys.
thanks for the head up on sites like this vlad…
You welcome Mark. I really suspected the site either was using click-bot, but I had absolutely no prove since the mentioned 600 clicks came from 50 us states or something like that.
Damn I was 2 minutes away from finishing the video when I accidentally closed the window.
Anyway, considering how domain parking is profitable enough to Google, I don’t suppose they will remove them anytime soon.
The sames with those 1.0 arbitrage sites. They’re practically everywhere and although they are infriging on Google’s TOS, why do we still constantly see them around?
I suppose it’s an evil we have to learn live with. But again, it would be much different if some big time AdWords advertiser woudl raise an issue. Not us little guys.