Google Ripper?

Published by: Codrut Nistor, in News

July17th2008

I heard about a lot of cases when different people tried to rip off Google and were caught in the process, losing their AdSense account and all the money inside it, but never thought I'd live to see the day when it happens the other way around. OK, I know there are a lot of smart guys clicking the ads on their own sites, I know there are also errors with this, and clean webmasters end up losing the money they worked hard to earn, but what about Google being the one guilty of fraud? Well, that's exactly what just happened!

The story goes like this - attorney Hal K. Levitte advertised his legal services though a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign last year. Nothing out of ordinary, millions of people do that, but they also get results from this action. What Mr. Levitte got was a fee of $136.11 for seeing his ads appear on various parked domains and error pages, instead of The New York Times and other similar websites! Now...is Google the ripper here, or not?

I guess Google made a little mistake here, since nothing's perfect, but their misfortune was to happen exaactly with a client that's an attorney...so now they have a class-action lawsuit opened in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. According to the complaint filed by Levitte's lawyers, his ad campaign ran between the 1st of June and the 18th of August, 2007, receiving no less than 202,528 impressions from parked domain pages. While this seems pretty impressive, our attorney here got only 668 clicks and no conversions, so he spent those money on nothing!

Wait, this is not everything - he also got 1,009 impressions, 25 clicks and zero conversions from various error pages, thank's to Google's AdSense for Errors... In the complaint, it is said that "Google includes millions of parked domains and error pages that have little or no content, and that result in practically zero conversions, in both its Content Network and its Search Network. Given the low quality of these parked domain and error pages, advertisers would not want to spend their advertising budgets on these distribution networks. However, Google designed its network in such a way that it was virtually impossible to opt out of the AdSense for Domains and/or AdSense for Errors programs."

Since Google says they didn't get to see the complaint yet, they made no official statement yet. What do you think...is Google the ripper, or is it being ripped off? I guess it's none of the above, but only a misunderstanding, and a lawsuit started for only $136 by someone who's not dying of starvation, anyway.