Word on the street is, Google is changing the display URL policy for Adwords on April 1st. This is most likely in response to the recent gaming of adsense by a few individuals who are able to completely dominate the entire page of adwords ads with nearly identical ads.
The supposed changes are as follows:
- You can no longer use fake display urls. The domain in your display url must match the url of the final destination exactly. No more using nickycocks.com as your display url in an effort to show up on the same page as an ad going to nickycakes.com, even if you own nickycocks.com and it redirects to nickycakes.com. This essentially means that no 2 people can show up on the same page and be advertising the same website. How to circumvent: Let’s just say, prepare for i-framed landing pages ad nauseam.
- You can still use a redirect, but the final landing page that the user sees MUST match the display url exactly. You can use a tracking link if you want still, but the final destination url must match your display url. How to circumvent: See previous “how to circumvent.”
So yeah, this will really only affect you if you are currently doing direct-to-offer stuff on adwords, and not using an intermediate landing page. Get ready to start putting all your offers in i-frames on your own domain.
Also of note, and probably the most important. This means on April 1st, tons of peoples ads are going to likely get disabled. Only one person is going to be able to show up on a page with the same display url, so look for a lot of people scrambling to get a high QS from scratch to compete for that one spot.
