Marketing Industry Concerned Over Scam Paid-Search Ads on Google
Following the growing prevalence of scam advertising on Google search results, marketing agencies are urging the search engine giant to be more effective at doing away with fraudulent paid-search ads.
If this is not taken in hand, they say it will not only damage the Google brand, but also the reputation of publisher sites.
Nevertheless, the situation is made difficult because scammers craftily target their fake ads at times and locations that are more difficult for Google's tracking robots and brands themselves to pick up on.
Their objective is to capture emails to build spam lists; sell suspect products; obtain consumer' credit card details and dupe users into downloading malware.
Google further tries to tackle the issue by requiring each paid search ad they publish to have two URLs - the display one which appears within the ad, and the destination one, which is where the ad in the URL directs the consumer.
Scammers are managing to circumvent this though through a process known as 'cloaking'. This works by identifying what the visitor to the web page is - if it's identified as a Googlebot (Google's web crawler), it's technically possible to show the tracker a completely different web page to what a normal user would be directed to.