Comments on: AdWords’ Scariest Loophole

By: Aidan

Aidan — Fri, 28 May 2010 23:43:35 +0000

Oh dear…

Guess we’d better start getting used to the GWT style verification for Adwords accounts! If thats too complicated for small business owners they’ll find it more necessary to use an Adwords manager!

By: Paid Search from Apple, Google Analytics Certification, & AdWords Loophole | DragonSearch Marketing

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:53:48 +0000

[...] the time. But what about driving traffic to a competitor’s site? Sound stupid? Alex Campbell’s post suggests otherwise with perhaps the largest, and most unethical, AdWords loophole ever thought of [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:58:25 +0000

Thanks Gene,
Let’s hope they don’t! We’ve seen this loophole cause problems once or twice (though never with the level of maliciousness I’ve considered above) and Google’s hands-off approach can make it difficult to rectify.

By: Gene Pao

Gene Pao — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:54:00 +0000

Great article. While we won’t do this to our competitors, I’m not confident that our competitors won’t do this to us. Definitely something to look out for!

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:04:03 +0000

Hi Barak,
You’re absolutely right of course – no legitimate advertiser or agency would ever exploit this loophole, but I don’t think that means there’s no risk. For an individual (angry customer, ex-employee etc.) getting banned from AdWords might be of no concern at all, because they might not ever want to use it legitimately. Same goes for a criminal operation, because they could presumably keep setting up accounts with various credit cards and never worry about getting banned. In these cases a Google ban would come too late for the victim involved; and, in fact, since Google have said that domain URLs are not covered by their trademark policy, there’s no guaranteeing they’d actually get banned at all.

By: Barak

Barak — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:31:01 +0000

Hi Alex,

Any advertiser with some common sense knows that a prank
like that ouuld cost him banishment for life on Google Adwords.

By: Paid Search from Apple, Google Analytics Certification, & AdWords Loophole | Dragonsearch Marketing Blog

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:38:33 +0000

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:01:49 +0000

Hi Periscopix, thanks for your comment. I agree this should be a relatively simple thing to resolve. To play devil’s advocate I guess Google may consider that the solution you suggest to be too complicated for some of the less tech-savvy small local advertisers who they want to attract. Maybe another solution would be for Google to only allow any one top-level domain to be associated with one AdWords account by default (something that could be changed for affiliate merchants) – that would mean that as long as the real advertiser had some AdWords activity running first, no rival (or individual) could then use that domain in their “fake” ads. Of course, there could still be an issue if a faker got in there first, but it would be a partial solution at least…

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:49:45 +0000

Hi James. I take your point – I guess it could be potentially risky to let this information fall into the wrong hands, but I’m of the view that those “wrong hands” could have easily discovered this anyway. In fact, I was in two minds as to whether I should describe this as a “loophole” since, in fact, there’s not really any trick to it at all. When I became aware of this it certainly struck me as something that was very interesting and quite concerning; and worthy of debate. From Google’s point of view, we’ve have been in touch with their team on both sides of the Atlantic and they’ve confirmed that they’re aware of this but don’t consider it a significant risk, stating it’s an advertiser-to-advertiser issue (as I say above, a problem for your lawyers, not theirs).

By: Periscopix

Periscopix — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:14:03 +0000

It would be so simple for Google to solve this problem. They already have the systems in place with Webmaster Central. The domain owner can upload a verification file to the root of their site. That will prove they’re the site owners. It would rule out direct linking affiliates though unless the merchants are willing to upload multiple verification files to their site.