You better have a landing page no more direct linking to your offers. Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.
Finally. I've complained to them about this, but they seem to care more about slapping good websites. Well, this is going to cut competition in many niches. At least they have some good moves. Also: you can do direct linking as long as your display URL is the merchant's URL (which means fighting against the double serving rule). nadavs
It will be interesting to see how far they take this. They're going to lose a lot of revenue with this move.
I think you mis read the release... you can direct link your offers... just url shown has to match the page you land on... i posted about it on my blog. and as far as them lossing revenue i don't think they care right now because they are making more and more daily. Do you realize everytime there is a adwords slap or change their revenue continues to go up....
How far they'll take this? It's going to be an automated system, that just makes sure your display matches the actual destination. Something that should've been enforced from the start, as it's been in their terms for a while. Cloaking can defeat the system, but now it's actually obvious who's cloaking (better change all my campaigns...).
Because that Policy isn't anything new, it's been supposed to be that way for over a year now, but until they were getting publicly ridiculed by those Ringtone guys that spammed the sponsored results for half a year with their fake display URLs, they didn't really care too much and only enforced it as part of their other guidelines. So no, Google won't be touting this change all month long only to stick to what they've been doing all along anyway.
but when they say it has to match the destination url, can i still have an ad that would take my visitors to mydomain.com/ and have a display of mydomain.com/text ? or even that "text part" wouldn't be allowed no more?
from what I am gathering, I think this is axactly what theya re trying to avoid. You landing must end up and the mydomain.com/text
My question was simple yet unanswered: how do you know that enforcement of the regulation will be automated and not manual? It doesn't say that it'll be automated anywhere that I've seen. Of course you can still have the "text" part. As long as the primary domains of the landing page and the display URL are the same, you'll be fine.
I answered it already. As part of their editorial process they've been already randomly checking the URLs. Now that they are going to enforce it much more strictly, I somehow doubt they will hire 1000 new employees that will check the display URL against the destination URL, seeing how they don't seem too care to much to hire enough to actually check the ads themselves.
Although I understand your reasoning, I don't think it'll be automated. The enforcement will not be immediately applied to ads which already exist but will be strictly applied to new ads. You would expect an automated system to work on both already-existing ads and new ads. All ads go through a review process soon after being launched. These reviews will now be a little more strict where the display URL is concerned. The hiring of new employees or the installation of an automated system is not necessary. At least that's what I'm assuming.
It will be automated at the new ad creation level. It's simple for them to check it automatically they just never did in the past. If($display_url == $destination_url){ echo "All is good"; }else{ echo "display does not match destination url"; } See I just wrote the code to automate it for Google and it took me 4 seconds!