Google is Lowercasing all Adwords Display URL's - This Sucks

[searchengineman]

Google has decided that we will all be better served. If Display URL's
are Lower Cased! (This will happen next week)

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/01/...search-ad.html

Ex: if you think torontoorderstoday.com looks
better than TorontoOrdersToday.com as a display URL.
I think Google is nuts, and disagree.


I for one am upset and think we should voice our opinions over this bad decision.
Searchengineman

[Deltron Zero]

PenIsland.com is definitely better than penisland.com

[Brian Sekerak]

I think the one good thing to come out of this is, that the Subdirectory will still be capitalized. It will actually make the utilization of subdirectory pages in display urls much more prevalent, and also put more focus on your actual copy body.

[searchengineman]

Thanks for the Shout out from Search Engine Roundtable - Barry - Rusty Brick
for picking up this issue.

There are people who have paid big money for domains, which do not work in lowercase iterations. Google claims that CTR's increase. Well on a case by case basis this may not be true. Also there are many foreign language URL's that will also suffer from this. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Searchengineman

[Mel66]

I agree - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We have tested lower case vs. initial caps extensively, and in nearly every case initial caps wins out over all lower case. Furthermore, I think this will actually result in lower CTRs for Google, which is another reason why it makes no sense at all to me. Google has done many things that are bad for advertisers but good for Google, but this one has me baffled.

[Discovery]

This is bad news.

We make extensive use of Intial caps with a great deal of success.

I had been hoping Google was going to go the other way in this area by providing more control over how our ads were displayed, specifically the URL. Many publishers use a text ad format that excludes the display URL. I believe Google should allow advertisers to target / exclude these publisher sites.

Deltron Zero - I don't think you could have come up with a better example. Hey, maybe you just need to change your product line? Ouch.

Will advertisers now start using domains with dashes. Pen-island.com? This may be our next move should this policy continue.

[Deltron Zero]

Originally Posted by Discovery

Deltron Zero - I don't think you could have come up with a better example. Hey, maybe you just need to change your product line? Ouch.

Here's another site that might be negatively affected-

WhoRepresents.com

The only site that will be only negligibly affected by this will be single word domains.

[Discovery]

Hmm, perhaps Google needs to offer a display URL tool for "alternate meanings" sort of like when you search for 800 vanity numbers. You put in your domain name and it spits out all possible word combinations.