21
PPC Sabotage
21 October 2008
by
admin
Filed under
Articles
Just been reading an interesting article on PPC Discussions about negative use of PPC to damage a competitor. It is alarming the length some advertisers will goto to damage the standing of a rival company rather than concentrate on promoting themselves. Also it seems that the main search platforms don’t seem to be that interested in combating this kind of practice. This is because anyone can use your top level domain to create ad’s with damaging if not defamatory/derogatory content. With the lifting of trademark restrictions earlier in the year from Google, it seems most companies really are powerless to combat this kind of practice.
I recently informed a client of a jilted customer that had gone to the lengths of creating a whole website dedicated to demonstrating the alledged poor quality of their product. They had even bought a very similar domain (spelt slightly differently) and had embarked upon a PPC campaign bidding on the cleint’s brand terms. Moreover the client wasn’t bidding on their own brand, so the only PPC ad was the offending one. When I spoke to Google they said that this was not against their guidelines and so long as the ad did not have anything defamatory or offensive within it, they would not take it down. Even more staggering was the client’s blasé attitude towards this problem - completely unconcerned!
So if someone wants to spread some muck about you on the internet it seems there is very little you can do, from a PPC perspective anyway. To try and reduce the impact of this, I would suggest buying up all the domain extensions relating to your company asap!
