The New Deceivers

There are two truths about new technology:

1. It won't work the way it's supposed to.

2. Someone will find a way to use it to deceive people.

In the past, I've exposed the Free Shipping Phonies and the Dubious Discounters, and today I'd like to add the Customer Confusers to the list, in the form of shopping.com, who don't get a link because they're a bunch of hooligans.

Shopping.com is basically a giant pay-per-click (PPC) shopping site that tries to recruit online businesses to be listed in their directory. If they can't get a popular site legitimately, they're apparently not above doing an end-run to deceive people into visiting their site. This gets a little tricky, so pay close attention.

Google provides two outstanding online services: AdWords, for my money the best PPC value online, and AdSense. AdWords lets you create those little ads that you see to the right of your search results. AdSense lets you run AdWords ads on your site and get a commission every time somebody clicks on them. There are people online attempting to make a living off Google's AdSense by creating gateway pages for popular search phrases and filling them with AdSense ads. They're called "Scrapers," and they're universally loathed by people looking for actual information online, because their sites contain no content.

Shopping.com has developed a variant of the Scraper tactic. If you search for 1-800-Bakery in Google, you'll see a Shopping.com ad. I've said this before, but I'll be as specific here as possible:

We are not affiliated with Shopping.com.

What they've done is created a search gateway page linked to our domain name. When you click the link, you're shown some products from our competitors (that will cost more than what we offer) and our AdWords ad, among others. No matter what you click, shopping.com gets a commission. Never mind that you're confused as to where you are, they're making money by leeching off our domain name.

I tried to solve this problem with an AdWords campaign that said the same thing as the bolded text above. Google won't let me do that, because Shopping.com is trademarked.

If I ever start deceiving people, remind me to trademark my domain name first so that nobody can fight back. In the meantime, I'm sure that shopping.com will be happy to see the phrase, "Who needs a directory?" every time somebody clicks on their AdWords link.