Black Hat PPC article by SEW's Own EvilGreenMonkey

[Mel66]

SEW Forum Mod Rob Kerry, aka evilgreenmonkey, dishes the dirt on black hat PPC techniques:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626830

What do you think of the article?

[BuckfastMonk]

Nice artile. Especially the "Copying Competitor Ads" section. I do this all the time to wind my competitors up

[adamap]

I've had my ad pilfered for years, now I know who it is! lol.

[Brisbane SEO Guy]

A very informative article. I particularly liked the suggestion of having a disposable credit card for Adwords payments.

I wonder, does copyright for an Adwords ad belong to the advertiser or to Google? Is that copyright enforceable? By spoofing someone else's domain name in the ad does that breach copyright? It could certainly breach trade mark laws if the domain was trade marked (ebay or amazon for example).

Very interesting legal questions.

[Discovery]

Good Evil, Good, But not Evil enough.

Hate to tease, but this conversation is best had in person. I bet you know of much, much more, and who does it.

Our competitors have copied our ads, our landing pages, including all source code, meta, title and alt tag content the real lazy ones even use our logo to create theirs.

Fortunately, we know who they are, and are pleased when mysteriously their 800 numbers are published on free trial sites for adult pleasures, sex talk lines and singles sites. I don’t doubt the in-house marketer uses these inflated call stats in his performance reports.

I'll tip my hand to one tame and sneaky, but not black hat technique. Simply set up alerts for scheduled news shows, talk shows, or major events that are related to your industry. Then create websites, and or ad campaigns around the topic so once it airs your site is virtually the only one advertising. For example, in the news is Oprah endorsing Obama, Fred Thompson could quickly create a http://www.oprahforobama.com website and by both reading her website and watching her show generate a campaign full of keywords that are related to key points and references made to the viewers ie; what they are likely to research online. This could produce a lot of traffic for them on the cheap.


Discovery

[AussieWebmaster]

Great start but am surprised we did not mention impression fraud.... turn off your ad and go to town on searching for a keyword so competitors get lowered CTR and thus you get higher for less

[roehrenbeck8]

I actually own OprahforObama.com. Any ideas on how to monetize this site?

[AussieWebmaster]

optimize the content for those names and run adsense

[roehrenbeck8]

Is that worth my time? I originally purchased the site a year or two ago with the anticipation of Oprah endorsing Obama which happened. Then I was going to try to sell the domain name, which I never pursued.

[beu]

Originally Posted by roehrenbeck8

Is that worth my time? I originally purchased the site a year or two ago with the anticipation of Oprah endorsing Obama which happened. Then I was going to try to sell the domain name, which I never pursued.

It may be worth your time but on the other hand, if you do to good of a job and the "wrong" person notices Harpo, Inc. may try to sue you for using their Registered US Trademark. Maybe not for the domain name but if that term is used in the site. Just something to consider and keep in you hip pocket!

[Rajat Garg]

As far as I know, companies have to file Patent / copyright related documents to get Google to penalize the sites in most cases. This is usually very expensive for the companies.

I was with a big retail company's affiliate program and this was a very normal occurring. Most of these are affiliates trying to make a quick buck.

We had a script that will regularly parse our logs to find who has sent traffic from paid ads and check, what is in the ad copy . If it is found that they are violating the terms, their account will get flagged and terminated.

All this while, company makes money on newbie PPC black hats, who think they are the first one to think about this :-)

Anyway, there are still many techniques that companies have not caught up to, but usually those genius black hats don't post them on blogs.