PC World and Ask and Ryanair and Google
Every now and again there are mutterings about brand hijacking in search, but here’s an interesting example of one operation muscling in on the search results of a completely unrelated company.
For a few moments yesterday afternoon, users searching for Ryanair on Google would have been offered sponsored links from Ask.com, a rival search engine, and – rather bizarrely – computer retailer PC World.
Overnight the PPC feed has changed on the keyword “ryanair” and only Ask.com remains in the sponsored links section.
How common is this practice? Any other weird examples?
Kevin May, editor, Travolution
3 comments:
Blimey, are PC World THAT desperate for the business, that they are "stealing" traffic from Ryanair.
It's happened to me, but my business name is very generic, so it's not as unusual as the Ryanair/PC World example.
Ask.com seems to be doing quite a bit of paid advertising on Google. Last week they were showing up in the paid listings for "raccoon".
I have seen ebay on hundreds of pointless search strings...
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