If You Can Beat’em, Play Dirty
Apparently, the blogoshpere is getting heated, especially in our small Northwest neck of the woods. Recently, I found myself at the receiving end of another agent’s deceptive Google Adwords campaign.
In respects to blogging, my primary focus is The Seattle Condo Blog. The condo blog has risen to become one of the top condo websites in Seattle - it’s #1 in Google’s organic search results for a myriad of condo related keywords and receives the most visitor traffic (per Compete, Alexa and Quantcast metrics) among Seattle-based condo blogs and websites. And, the exclusive partnership with King5.com is a testament to the blog’s reputation. Admittedly, it’s a nice position to be in.
Well, it appears an agent with a competing condo blog got a little envious and started to play dirty. The agent bought Google Adwords with my name as the keyword search term as well as the title of the ads themselves. Thus, if someone googled my name, the other agent’s ads would show up on the right hand side of the page with my name. As users click on my name thinking they were going to my site, they were instead directed to the other agent’s site. Here’s a screen print:
When confronted the agent removed the ads. Of course, this agent claims no knowledge of this pathetic and unethical attempt to steal traffic and use my name to mislead the public. The agent blames the webmaster, who wouldn’t…but then the agent is closely related to the webmaster.
Our industry has a bad public image and it doesn’t help when a “respected” colleague resorts to this sort of tactic.
Don’t fret. Take it as a badge of honor.
Gotta admit, she doesn’t play around;)
I actually have a similar story with whom I think is the same agent. When I confronted him/her about putting a personal web address in listing details I was emailing to a client, the agent claimed to not know it was against policy and an unethical marketing strategy. Yeah right!
wow, how do you do that? i searched on google but didn’t see the ad.
The ads were removed.
Last year when you searched for Windermere, Redfin ads came up. Zip Realty is still buying the search term “Windermere Real Estate”. MLS Online buys that term too, and the search phrase “John L. Scott Real Estate”. They also buy the link to my webpage url name “Seattle Dream Homes”.
If they didn’t change their search terms, I believe you could complain to the NWMLS about it.
Hey Ben, next time at least let the ad stay up long enough so we can all click on it.
That should get the message across.
AMAZING what people will do. I’m happy for you that it has been cleared up, but did you lodge a formal ethics complaint? I would, seeing as how you may not be the only victim (per comments) of this agent.
Is that how you know you’re “somebody” when your name is used as currency? Maybe I should change my last name to Trump or Kakimoto!
It’s a common strategy to buy advertising on search terms that bring up competitors. Nothing unethical with that.
It is, however, false advertising to place an ad that misrepresents the service/personality/product/etc as your doppelgänger has done. It’s also against the terms of use for Google’s advertising. If it were brought to Google’s attention it would seriously hamper future Google advertising efforts by the false advertiser (Google has better things to do than monitor all of this, so when something sneaky is brought to their attention they tend to use a one-strike policy).
Again: Advertising on your competitors branded search terms is smart. But don’t misrepresent yourself, that’s not smart.
I’m not sure how this issue effects MLS rules or if there are stated rules for this in most MLSes. I’d love to know though.
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G - I don’t believe it violates our MLS rules but it is a violation of the Realtor code of ethics.