13th Jul 2007
Deceptive Advertising in Search
Downunder in Australia, Google and the Trading Post are being accused of deceptive advertising over sponsored search listings involving 2 automotive dealer names. In would appear that Trading Post purchased ads using competitive automotive dealer names. When consumers clicked on the ads then redirected users to the Trading Post where a variety of automotive classified ads could be found. Most of the action has focused on Google but it would appear that Trading Post is equality as culpable.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission wants Google to provide better distinction between paid advertising and organic search. This would set an interesting president for Google which has been relatively free to dictate how their run their paid search advertising programs.
In Canada they seem to allow anyone to purchase ads for competitive keywords, including Trademarks but the actual ad creative cannot contain any Trademarks that you don’t own. Even then the system is often abused and Google is slow to resolve abuse from smaller companies use Trademarks in their advertising.
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