Adwords/Overture Bait and Switch

Hey guys,

First off...if this is in the wrong area mods, feel free to move it around, I wasn't quite sure.

Now, on to my question.

We have been doing a fair amount of google and overture advertising for our site based on 'seat covers', if you want to check it out it is shearcomfort dot com (hope it's ok to put that in here, if not delete away mods).

Now, recently we noticed something that is a little disturbing.

What is happening is this. Certain 'advertisers' are bidding on keywords in google, low cost keywords like 'toilet seat covers' or 'bead seat covers' in a broad match. They then forward that traffic to a page which consists solely of overture ads for the keyword 'seat covers'.

To see an example, just search 'bead seat covers' in google. The main culprit I have noticed is a site you will see TrueLocal dot com. When you follow the link, they have the overture listings for 'seat covers' on the page, all a lot more expensive than the 'bead seat covers' in google.

So, I'm wondering if anyone else out there has had any issues with this sort of thing. It's gotten to the point where we are getting about $50-100 worth of garbage traffic from these sites on a daily basis. After trying to get it sorted out with google and yahoo/overture and basically being brushed off we decided to just give up on that keyword.

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Personally, I think this is a rather unethical thing for the search engines to be allowing, but they don't seem to care.

Thanks in advance

How did you know the keywords that came from adsense to your listing on trulocal?

maybe you can ask overature for them to exclude you from their search feeds.

Prolly not but you could try.

I did a bunch of testing, they were most likely using a broad match with a low bid on 'seat covers', so that you could type in just about anything and they'd show up. It then leads to a page that has queried the overture/yahoo ads on 'seat covers'

So, someone could search for 'bead seat covers' and they just end up on a page supplying the overture listings for seat covers. This may or may not be what they are looking for, but it just seems wrong to me.

We have talked to overture and google about it, but they haven't been to helpful.