techipedia | tamar weinberg

Earlier this morning, I reported on Search Engine Roundtable that Google users are becoming infected with malware after clicking on Sponsored Listings. The problem was discovered on April 10th. Another victim of a similar Google AdWords hack reported the issue on April 23rd.

Yesterday, I also addressed a consistent concern about irrelevant Google AdSense ads. This problem is a lot more prevalent. The URLs don’t necessarily take users to the desired location. I suppose the paid search experience, even with a Quality Score, is just not as good as the organic search experience for some terms.

It’s April 26th and there’s a definite need for a very involved human element to be introduced into assessing the reliability of sponsored listings. Minutes ago, I noticed via TheGoogleCache that there’s a definite problem with sponsored results displaying totally useless information.

I was able to reproduce the problem too. Take a look and see for yourself:

As more and more people find the way to monetize, more and more people find ways to exploit monetization. With the billions of dollars Google invests in advertising, it would be a wonderful thing if they got it down pat algorithmically. But until then, there should be a many more pairs of eyes working to ensure that surfer experience is enhanced from a paid perspective.