Cloaking for AdWords
A post by Barry on SEL discusses cloaking AdWords URL's to get around the display URL policy from Google (displayed domain in the ad has to exactly match the destination domain for the ad). The source for the "news" is a post by Stephen, who shows a good example of it, on which Matt commented immediately.
But this isn't really new is it? And it's not only about the display URL policy either... It's about hijacking a good page / domain to get a good quality score, and using that quality score to make sure you get cheap clicks on your bad landing pages (with high CTR's, I bet)...
Trust me, this has been going on for quite a while, and it's done for all sorts of reasons outside of this one: cloaking to be able to use flash landing pages, to serve high quality pages to Google and high converting pages to customer's, etc. etc. You'd think Google was aware of this by now...
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Cats: Online Marketing Tags: SEM, spam
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To be fair, I did say... "I don't believe cloaking your AdWords ads is something brand new."
I might be wrong in the application of this particular case. Some cases I saw seemed to cloak to get around the display URL policy. Others, I wasn't so sure.
Heh, you're right, sorry about that Barry :) It might very well be used for the display url policy of course, but for a whole lot more too...