Black Hat PPC

The BlackHatters read an interesting article the other day on a really good blog that we follow called PPC Without Pity.

The author, Shawn Livengood, wrote an article called – Black Hat PPC Techniques, which we found pretty interesting. Unfortunately, PPC Without Pity doesn’t allow users to comment on articles but we wanted to respond to the article he had written as its an interesting subject.

Shawns, first point was around the use of Multiple Accounts…in which he stated;

Black Hat PPC Technique #1: Multiple Accounts

This is the most common black hat technique, and many advertisers do this without even knowing it’s wrong. It’s pretty simple in it’s execution: just open up another PPC account with the same provider. Both Google and Microsoft forbid this, but their only real way of preventing it is blocking users from using the same credit card number for multiple accounts. Just bring out another credit card (preferably with a different billing address) and you’re on your way to double-serving in the SERPs. In order to prevent detection, double-servers often use a separate domain name for their second account. But of course, this phony domain will redirect to the real one via a landing page button or link, simulating affiliate marketing tactics. If you’ve got enough money (and the guts to flaunt PPC rules), you might even get away with serving two or three ads per SERP to drive more PPC traffic.

Interesting point…no problems in setting up more than one account, however, on the double serving point. You cant direct two AdWords accounts to the same domain you’ll just replace each other’s ad depending on your bid. Yes, you can do it through a redirect but Google looks at the last page that the redirect lands on when approving ads. You could set up a redirect which was long (over 5 seconds) to trick Google, but then 3 things happen…

1.  Your ad’s Quality Score is pretty rubbish

2. You’ll probably have your ad suspended for poor landing page quality

3.  If you do get someone to click on your ad, they’ll have 5 seconds to wait before going through to your site…which is way to long and users will just click off. This will just result in paying for clicks and then the traffic not coming through to your site.

His next point is around Creative Geotargeting…

Black Hat PPC Technique #2: “Creative” Geotargeting

This one’s popular with unscrupulous affiliates. Many companies that engage affiliate marketers will have specific rules preventing affiliates from bidding on specific keywords in PPC, such as a company’s brand name or trademarks. These keywords are likely to come in at a very low CPA, so it doesn’t make sense to outsource marketing acquisition for them. But, companies can’t catch what they can’t see. A shady affiliate can set up a campaign using the banned words, and exclude the partner company’s geographic area from the campaign’s geotargeting. That would make it unlikely for any employee of the company to stumble across a rule-breaking affiliate’s PPC ad. A truly ambitious PPC black-hatter might exclude the areas of any Google headquarters to try and avoid detection from Google account representatives. But with Google campuses all around the country, you might end up excluding more territory than you include.

Good point! You are right in this as a Black Hat PPC technique that is commonly used. The only other bit we’d add, would be rather than just negative geo-targeting around Google and a companies headquarters…you can also send the company an email and wait for a reply. From the email you’ll be able to get the companies IP address and then you can block that as well if you use the wildcard function in Google IP Exclusion.

And his final point was on Slander….

Black Hat PPC Technique #3: Slander!

Everybody has a PPC competitor that they’d love to crush. But Google and Microsoft policies are protective of trademarks, so you can’t create an ad with a competitor’s name in it (most of the time, anyway). You can bid on a competitor’s name in a keyword, though. You might incur some quality score penalties due to lack of relevance, but at least you’ll show up. There’s one tiny loophole, though – everybody has some bad press somewhere. If you’re willing to be a real PPC douchebag, you can bid on your competitor’s brand name and point your destination URL to a page of bad reviews or a negative press article. Guess what – this page will be highly relevant to that brand name! And you just might scare away some potential customers that will flock to your less scandalous site! You still can’t use the trademarked name in the ad title, but some dynamic keyword insertion might take care of that as well.

Hehe, we liked this one. Its not something we ever get involved with as we don’t really see the point. The best example we see of this constantly is on the keyword ‘iolo’ in the US (use the ad preview tool if you are outside the US to see the ad.) Where you see the following ads…

The ad on the right is for a site called ‘www.softwareindustryreport.com’ and goes on to a landing page giving a really bad review of Iolo System Mechanic and providing links to alternative products. It wouldn’t be sooo bad if this ad hadn’t been showing for months now and Google hasn’t done anything about it!

All in all though, really enjoyed the article. Nice work!

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