Clever fake New Years Day PPC ads using DailyMail.co.uk as display URL
If you were to click on the Google logo on New Years day it would have taken you to the search results for the phrase “New Year’s Day” as shown in the screenshot below. When I looked at this the dailymail.co.uk advert stood out to me because although the Daily Mail isn’t noted for high level journalism I very much doubt they use PPC to promote stories.
Sure enough when I clicked on the ad it took me straight to a really really clever site about some kind of wrinkle treatment. The clever bit about this page is that it uses a geotargeting script to automatically insert the location of the reader into the paragraph so it looks like a local lady has reviewed it – try visiting via a proxy and watch the location change in the page. The page also has social proof with fake facebook buttons and logos of other reputable sites too.
The site is so clever that it took me quite a while to figure out whether it was real or not. The proof is that if you search via the image URL in Google images for “Emily” on the right of the page it comes up with an article on photoshopping showing the same before & after shots for a lady with a different name.
The really interesting thing for me is that they managed to trick Google into using dailymail.co.uk as a display URL. The target URL wasn’t a dailymail.co.uk one so it’s not some kind of XSS hack. I assume they are redirecting Googlebot to the dailymail.co.uk page and cloaking everybody else.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Very interesting – a nice example of black-hat SEO. I wonder how long before Google kicks it out of the SERPs? (Probably by then they will have cashed out big time).
Isn’t this like a “FLOG” site which by enlarge the FTC in the states have really cracked down on it the past year or so, mainly used in promoting biz Ops cpa offers, these types of flogs used to be massive for US traffic, surprised that I haven’t seen as many for UK? Though how they used the dailymail url is quite interesting considering Google are so stringent and ban happy over breaches of their TOS’s which are much less severe than this.
Never seen the fake URLs in Google, but I’ve seen the fake reviews with the inserted location and fake facebook comments on several occasions, but I thought I had accidentally clicked on some ad when on a site!! Finally I realized that I had simply hovered over an ad and it acted like an actual click – interesting…
I saw these as well when I was searching for some recipes last night – couldn’t believe it – not sure how they managed to uplaoid the ads with daily mail URL’s – and they were using Independent URL’s as well – I thought they would be trademarked with Google and therefore those ads should have been disapproved?
The page also had an awful pop-up when you tried to close the page saying ‘are you sure you don’t want to try a sample…’
Wonder how many they sold before the ads got pulled?!
It seems they have taken over http://www.independent.co.uk as well: I can only imagine the Daily Mail are fuming as it’s unlikely they had the necessary technical or legal capacity over christmas to get these ad’s removed.
Saw the same campaign but using a BBC news URL around the same time.
It seems the advertiser has been getting away with this trick for a while. This is from 12th December: http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/blog/when-display-and-destination-ads-dont-match/
While Google flagged this ad, I am sure it will be showing up on lots of other sites. It is certainly a shady ad using black hat techniques, but I am sure to a certain extent it works. Other wise no one would use PPC to show their ads.
The Geo targeting though is really slick. I live in Honolulu, and when i clicked the link, sure enough, looks just like the ad was made for me here in Hawaii.
I guess as long as companies continue to make money, we will continue to see ads like these…If not on Google, than some other site…
I’ve seen this a lot on Adsense ads on my site, also seen these flogs 100s of times around the internet.
The geotargeting script and the fake social proof is something they all do – there are literally 1000s of people who’ve been doing this to generate millions of dollars in profit per month for almost 4 years.
The heyday was in 2008, some affiliates made 7 figure sums a month and the merchants even more. Then the merchant accounts started shutting them down, Google banned many and the FTC cracked down extremely heavily in the US (and Canada).
Check out this example of an affiliate who ran these “rebill” scams using fake blogs, fake news sites etc who generated 500 million+ in one year. He’s now probably going to jail though so not so good for him…
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/39157–what-s-he-selling-now
Interesting. But doesn’t the display URL have to be the same as the destination URL?
Interesting indeed! But yeah, that’s not gonna last long i SERP, is it?
Very important news, thank you. I hope that websites like this, that decide to use improper techniques will get sued or banned from the Google AdWords network
Yes definitely a black hat technique, I’m sure Google aren’t impressed with this outcome, I’m sure it wont be to long until they kick it off.
That really clever. What was the purpose? Could you do that Patrick?
Very Interesting….
Mmm, Funny Hack. Well they don’t ‘Do SEO’ so why would they buy PPC … Maybe they can buy a brand firewall from Google … in 2022
It’s clear that this type of practice has been going on for “years” – and yet Google, at least in the UK, are so slow to react…
Interesting stuff, very oppertunistic and at the same time very clever.
Hi, these are still around on the Bing display network.
This morning I can see two in a single block on the Doonesbury site – http://www.doonesbury.com/strip.
One with a dailymail.co.uk as the visible url and the other consumerlifestyles.org. Going to a pair of landing pages, one the same as your photo above. Same con.
It’s easy to set up this stuff. The investment only really pays off because Ad networks aren’t going to police it, as they’re making revenue.
It’s hard to blame them. For years newspapers (in the UK at least) have been just as guilty of letting scammers advertise their wares.
It is typically done by a cloaker (yes, blackhat). These guys are clever enough to know the ip addresses that Google employees use to check landing pages. They show the regular site if it falls within these ranges and show a different page when it doesn’t.
But couldn’t Google tell that the resulting domain is different to the input domain, even if they were cleverly redirecting Google’s PPC bots?
I found the small print at the bottom of the site quite funny, apparently the information is loosely based on reality except it “has been modified in multiple ways including, but not limited to: the story, the photos, and the comments.”
So pretty much everything then…
Yes I really don’t get how they could have tricked Google like that. Surely it isn’t so easy? Google are supposed to be hard asses.
Appreciate the recommendation. Let me try it out.
Great, but it would be better if in future you can share more about this subject.
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Couldn’t they get into serious serious legal trouble by doing this?
It sounds foolish to use a popular website such as the dailymail to do a scam like this.
I would have thought this was highly illegal. I don’t really understand how they can have got away with it but then as a web marketer, you kind of have to admire them
Do you think these sort of scams are very profitable? For instance wouldn’t google just disable their account quite quickly? Also how were they monetizing this? Is it some sort of CPA offer?
I believe that once they get caught, they could get into serious legal trouble with the daily mail. You can’t just pretend your organisation is something completely else (especially faking one of “the big ones” like daily mail). This is probably why google should do some more checking on ads once they go live. Quite sure the ads is gone by now though, but still they had their time and I am certain a lot of people visited their scam site.
I would expect Google would take off such a site from its search engines. That is big time scam. especially using DailyMail for it.
A very nice article on SEO. Google must some ways to eliminate threats of Black Hat SEO. And encourage Grey hat….Thanks for sharing..
I hope that even i could get my site approved for Google Mews. Anyways great article..
OMG is this Google Adwords ? why not google strict their algorithms on Spamming as well Adwords?
These kinda ads makes people hate the Google search results even they consistently update their quality algorithms.
Hey Google take a look…. those are getting you to worst.
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January 24, 2012 at 11:52pm