Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

Google has been sued for fraud, business code violations and unfair enhancement. Claims came up from company’s supposed sale of ‘low quality ads’. The lawsuit was filed by lawyers from Schubert Jonckheer Kolbe & Kralowec in a San Jose, Californian, U.S. District Court. The firm is based in San Francisco.

In the complaint, it said that the online “Levitte International” ad campaign lasted for 2.5 months, from June 1, 2007 till August 18, 2007, got 202,528 impressions  from parked domain pages.

AdSense for Domains is an advertising program that is run by Google and makes price cut of parked pages. According to Google’s online documentation:

Parked domain pages generally have no content; however, by adding targeted ads, we hope to help users find what they are looking for.

Using Google’s semantic technology to analyse and understand the meaning of the domain names, AdSense for Domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages to improve the user experience on these pages.

Irrespective of semantic technology of Google, the compliant says that the Levitte ads just didn’t work. It got 668 clicks and zero conversions out of 202,528 impressions on parked domain pages. With Google’s AdSense for Errors program, the ads even appeared on the error pages with 1,009 impressions, 25 clicks and ZERO conversions.

Around $136.11 were spent for ads on parked domains by Levitte which was about 15.3% of his $887.67 campaign of ad. Levitte’s attorney Kimberly Kralowec said:

We believe it’s a problem that affects all (Google’s) advertisers equally.

If found guilty, Google will have to pay a very high price. Recently the search engine was seen in trouble with Viacom as the court gave a ruling against them. They also had troubles with privacy groups.

Alleging Google, the compliant said:

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.

The compliant further says that although Google let advertisers decide where to put ads i.e. Google Search, Search Network or Content Network, it doesn’t provide any setting screen which will let advertisers select the domains or error networks.

Back in March, Google changed its Site Exclusion Tool to let advertisers select entire website categories where their ads won’t be visible. Previously sites were individually specified. The compliant argued on this by claiming that the Site Exclusion Tool only let you choose from the entire Content Network but not other than parked domains or error pages.

The search engine giant has done some alteration since then and now advertisers can locate more information on how ads work on parked domains. Levitte’s representative says that Google has yet to address the complete issue. Google on the other hand didn’t make any statement on this issue.