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The Link Policy for Google AdWords Advertisers Needs Work

The text ads on Google Adwords are generally made of four lines. The fourth line in the ad, called the Display URL, gives users an idea of the advertiser's website to which they will be taken when they click on an ad.

Google Adwords Editorial guidelines allows advertisers to have a display URL which may or may not match the actual address of the advertisers' websites. For instance, you could have yahoo.com in the Display URL though the visitor lands on ask.com on clicking the Adsense ad.

And Adwords advertisers' are exploiting this very loophole in Adwords policies to attract more visitors to their website as you will notice in the screen capture below:

Google Adwords Ad

This Adsense screenshot was captured from our previous story on Amazon Discounts. Here the Display URL points to Adsense.com/Adsense which is actually a 404 page. The ad takes you to an affiliate page on clickbank.net but it's impossible for the visitor to get an about the destination website from the ad itself.

Infact, Adsense.com is a Google owned property that redirects to google.com/adsense.

Adwords Quality raters should be able to spot such misleading ads but what Google needs a stricter link policy where the destination URL should be similar or a subset of the display URL if not exactly alike.

Related: Microsoft vs Google Adwords Advertiser

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