Is it unethical to take advantage of a competitor's mistake?

[garyv]

Originally Posted by robert25

The example you had given is perfect one. Leaving opportunities like that is some what a dumb approach towards a business.

If one don't take advantage of that, then there will be another how will grab it.

This types of smart moves actually increase vision about finding leaks, though its not a business model at all, but still it can give a nice lesson about avoiding mistakes of ourself and capitalizing others mistakes .

Yes I definitely do not use this as a business model. I just try to make myself aware of my surroundings at all times. After over a decade of doing this, you find traffic in the weirdest of places sometimes if you're paying close enough attention. Something someone says on TV, or even an ad in the newspaper could be a traffic gold mine if you know how to harness it. I'd never spam or do anything illegal, but I will gladly take traffic if it's being left unattended.

[Michael Motley]

No its not unethical, its competition.

[JeffLam]

I would say its grey - its kinda unethical yet smart in a manner.

However, you removed the 'unethical' part by at initially trying to contact the guy to correct his mistake first!

Well done dude!
Jeff

[Jeremy Morgan]

Originally Posted by sbucciarel

Domainers are a little crazy and somewhat obsessed. I often see something on TV and run to the computer to see if something is already registered. I also dream about domains and get up in the middle of the night and check to see.

Glad to know I'm not the only person who does that. My friends and family think I'm nuts.

What is unethical is clicking on a competitor's ad, and obviously not intending to buy the products. Competitor clicking is one of the biggest reasons I don't use PPC very much for my advertising. It's wrong, and if you feel you need to do something like that to compete, you should probably go back and look at your business model again.

You took advantage of a mistake and it was smart, but opportunistic at best. It may not be considered "unethical" but it isn't exactly something to be proud of either. Integrity is pretty important in business, and remember what goes around, comes around.

[garyv]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Morgan

Glad to know I'm not the only person who does that. My friends and family think I'm nuts.

What is unethical is clicking on a competitor's ad, and obviously not intending to buy the products. Competitor clicking is one of the biggest reasons I don't use PPC very much for my advertising. It's wrong, and if you feel you need to do something like that to compete, you should probably go back and look at your business model again.

You took advantage of a mistake and it was smart, but opportunistic at best. It may not be considered "unethical" but it isn't exactly something to be proud of either. Integrity is pretty important in business, and remember what goes around, comes around.

Actually - I never clicked on the ad - If I said that I mispoke. I never click on adwords ads when I'm browsing. There's a way to find out an adwords link without clicking on it, you just do a right mouse click on the link and look at the properties. I look at my competition all of the time - it would actually be kind of crazy not to.

[Wakunahum]

If you have done everything you can to contact the person, I think it's perfectly ethical.

No sense in that traffic just going to waste.

[Rich Struck]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

No, he's not. If the ad points nowhere, it's not traffic - it's an unsatisfied customer. Another company CAN and SHOULD step in to make that customer happy.

Imagine that it's a real business. The company runs an ad with the wrong address. Customers drive down there, and the address is vacant.

Is it unethical to lease that address for your own business?

No. It's smart.

Is it unethical to make that business the same kind of business that ran the ad?

No. It's smart.

All the OP did is step into someone else's screwup and turn a dissatisfied customer into a happy one. Having done the actual work, he collects the money. And if that screwup happened to cost another business more money on top of the lost customer, that's their problem and their fault.

Give me a break.

At least now I know who not to do business with.

[R Hagel]

Even if it's a protected/private registration, usually the registration includes an email address which should forward to the person who owns the domain. This works kind of like CraigsList, where the real address is hidden from anyone who's replying to an ad... but you can get an email through.

(In fact, I just sent myself an email using the anonymous email address on one of my domains provided by NameCheap's private registration, and it forwarded to my regular address.)

So you should be able to inform this person of his/her mistake if the anonymous email does indeed forward.

Cheers,
Becky

[garyv]

Originally Posted by Rich Struck

Give me a break.

At least now I know who not to do business with.

Hey come on, I'm not trying to create battles and make enemies here. If anything let it be a story to remind us to pay attention to details. And if it makes you feel better, I have deleted the index page on that site, so that the traffic again goes to nowhere.

Sheesh I didn't realize that this would create such a controversy. Anyways my original URL has been closed, so lets pretend that the original title is now: "Pay attention to details".

Let's all be happy warriors now and get along and make some money!

[Scott Ames]

Originally Posted by garyv

I was doing my usual competitor scouting on google to check out the competition, and I noticed an adwords ad, where they had mis-typed their url. Example - they had put widget-big.com, instead of big-widget.com. I look at the adwords link and it goes nowhere. So then I do a search, and find that the url is not registered. I register the url and have a website up in about 15 minutes. Now I'm getting free traffic from a url mistype.

Not unethical. You are in competition so I think its just a lucky break. However, they won't be your best friend and perhaps you can forget about a joint venture.

Once a warrior sent a URL out to his list that was wrong. He was at the airport and did it in a hurry I'm sure. Since he would be on a flight for the better part of a day I knew he would lose sales. It was an affiliate redirect. I registered the incorrect domain and pointed it to where it should go for him. Could I have taken his traffic? Yes with ease, but I made the choice not to.
He was totally shocked and appreciative. It didn't lead to a joint venture, or even a cup of coffee, but I felt really good and have a story to tell.

To each his own.

[Jeremy Morgan]

Originally Posted by garyv

Actually - I never clicked on the ad - If I said that I mispoke. I never click on adwords ads when I'm browsing. There's a way to find out an adwords link without clicking on it, you just do a right mouse click on the link and look at the properties. I look at my competition all of the time - it would actually be kind of crazy not to.

Ok, I apologize for making that assumption.

[garyv]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Morgan

Ok, I apologize for making that assumption.

Actually I don't think you did, I think I did type that I clicked the link somewhere. But what I should have said was I used the link. So it was my bad.

[R Hagel]

Originally Posted by Scott Ames

Once a warrior sent a URL out to his list that was wrong. He was at the airport and did it in a hurry I'm sure. Since he would be on a flight for the better part of a day I knew he would lose sales. It was an affiliate redirect. I registered the incorrect domain and pointed it to where it should go for him. Could I have taken his traffic? Yes with ease, but I made the choice not to.
He was totally shocked and appreciative. It didn't lead to a joint venture, or even a cup of coffee, but I felt really good and have a story to tell.

Awesome. No JV (though I'd imagine that's still possible), no coffee... but definitely a lot of good Karma.

Cheers,
Becky

[garyv]

Originally Posted by Scott Ames

Not unethical. You are in competition so I think its just a lucky break. However, they won't be your best friend and perhaps you can forget about a joint venture.

Once a warrior sent a URL out to his list that was wrong. He was at the airport and did it in a hurry I'm sure. Since he would be on a flight for the better part of a day I knew he would lose sales. It was an affiliate redirect. I registered the incorrect domain and pointed it to where it should go for him. Could I have taken his traffic? Yes with ease, but I made the choice not to.
He was totally shocked and appreciative. It didn't lead to a joint venture, or even a cup of coffee, but I felt really good and have a story to tell.

To each his own.

Actually, I like that story much better than my own. If I had known this person I might have considered doing that. However, I had no way of contacting this person. R Hagel - above says that I may have been able to contact them through the private whois email address, but I did not know that at the time.

That is a great story though, I would have gladly given you at least a split of my earnings.

[Raydal]

I know that Yahoo would automatically disable your ad if it leads
to a blank page but I guess Adwords doesn't have that feature.

As far as ethics is concerned this is a dilemma of waste vs. economy,
and not honesty vs. dishonesty since you tried to contact the
'competitor'. How many Warriors contact their competitors to tell
them how to improve their Adwords?

-Ray Edwards

[la dominatrix]

Fabulous priceless that has made my week. I to would love to know how you long you get free traffic for, and frankly if soemone makes such a stupid mistake it could be ages before they notice.

[Zemalf]

Good job on spotting that and nice tip on the URL-spotting from TV too!

I don't understand how anyone can set their ads without double-checking them first, but oh well, mistakes happen. I wonder how long it takes for the fellow to realize his mistake

[Jason_V]

I, personally, love how you ask in a public forum if something is "ethical" Then, when someone turns around and tells you something you didn't want to hear, you get self-righteous.

It seems to me you wouldn't have asked in the first place, if you thought everything was sunshine and kittens. Unless, of course you were trying to demonstrate that you are "oh, so superior and clever" to everyone here with a thinly veiled intention.

If you contacted the Google Adwords team, and told them, they would probably in turn contact the publisher.

Originally Posted by garyv

I'd hate the fact that I made the mistake and would hope that someone would email me and let me know. And that's what I tried to do in the beginning, however the original url had no contact information, and the registration info in the whois was private.

That's money just being thrown out the window in my opinion. I'm just providing the bucket to catch it with. If that makes me scummy, then bring on the scum

[dsmpublishing]

I call it lucky - i think many of us would do the same given the chance even though not all of us would actually admit to it!!!

kind regards


sam
X

[Jason_V]

Speak for yourself, because quite frankly I consider it theft.

The publisher is paying for that traffic. You are getting that traffic for free. I have no qualms about taking advantage of a competitor's mistakes so long as I spend my own dime doing it.

Yeah, you can argue he spent his own money on the domain name. However, that's like saying, you see a tractor trailer driving down the road. The driver fcrgot to lock the trailer up. a pallet of merchandise falls out. You have a friend wait there while you go rent a U-Haul.

It's yours though, because you spent the money on the U-Haul, right?

Originally Posted by dsmpublishing

I call it lucky - i think many of us would do the same given the chance even though not all of us would actually admit to it!!!

kind regards


sam
X

[garyv]

Originally Posted by Jason_V

If you contacted the Google Adwords team, and told them, they would probably in turn contact the publisher.

I think I did mention above that I contacted a google adwords rep about this. But I don't expect much action on their part.

Believe me, I've contacted adwords before for affiliates that were sending traffic directly to my site - forgetting to put their own affiliate link in the middle. I went through 4 reps before one understood what I was talking about, and yet they still did not contact the affiliate about their mistake.

I did email a rep however. So if they contact the person is up to them.

[garyv]

Originally Posted by Jason_V

Speak for yourself, because quite frankly I consider it theft.

The publisher is paying for that traffic. You are getting that traffic for free. I have no qualms about taking advantage of a competitor's mistakes so long as I spend my own dime doing it.

Yeah, you can argue he spent his own money on the domain name. However, that's like saying, you see a tractor trailer driving down the road. The driver fcrgot to lock the trailer up. a pallet of merchandise falls out. You have a friend wait there while you go rent a U-Haul.

It's yours though, because you spent the money on the U-Haul, right?

That's not even close to being the same scenario. If you know how adwords works, then you know that the traffic being sent to that mis-typed domain is gone forever from this person, no matter what I or anyone else does.

Suppose I put up an adwords ad and accidentally type in a url that YOU already own. Would that be considered stealing on your part? You'd be getting traffic that I paid for?

[Jack Duncan]

Interesting idea....

Now, just how many hours before some clown creates the "Mistyped Url Ad Finder" software which is a spider that scans pages for mistyped URLS that aren't registered and reports back to you so you can scoop up the traffic.

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by Rich Struck

At least now I know who not to do business with.

Me, too. Isn't it nice how that works?

[Jason_V]

Again,

You asked in the title of the thread "Is it unethical..."

here's a definition of ethical from dictionary.reference.com:

pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality; pertaining to right and wrong in conduct.

To follow that up here's a definition of morality:

founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom: moral obligations.

The point being, ethics and morals are more about the frame of reference per individual.

You'll never convince me that what you're doing isn't stealing. That's based on my ethics and morals.

I agree wholeheartedly with what ptlhost said above me. There's a HUGE difference between someone accidentally pointing traffic to a domain name you own and purposely funneling that traffic for monetary gain.

Again, you're the one who asked the question. Don't cry sour grapes when people tell you what you don't want to hear. If you were so sure that it was on the level; sunshine and kittens as I put it, then you would've never posted asking about it.

If you're so convinced it was ethical and moral, than why do you have to keep justifying it? If you truly don't think there's nothing wrong with it, more power to you. Just don't be upset when others dissent.

Originally Posted by garyv

That's not even close to being the same scenario. If you know how adwords works, then you know that the traffic being sent to that mis-typed domain is gone forever from this person, no matter what I or anyone else does.

Suppose I put up an adwords ad and accidentally type in a url that YOU already own. Would that be considered stealing on your part? You'd be getting traffic that I paid for?

[Floyd Fisher]

Originally Posted by garyv

I was doing my usual competitor scouting on google to check out the competition, and I noticed an adwords ad, where they had mis-typed their url. Example - they had put widget-big.com, instead of big-widget.com. I look at the adwords link and it goes nowhere. So then I do a search, and find that the url is not registered. I register the url and have a website up in about 15 minutes. Now I'm getting free traffic from a url mistype.

Pretty smart if you ask me.

Though I would talk to a lawyer, and see what the odds are of getting sued over it. Even if you're right, it's a pain to defend your actions in the face of their obvious stupidity.

[Kim Standerline]

Are you kidding, of course its not unethical (or scummy)

Serves him right for making such a stupid mistake, Gary already said he tried to warn him

Kim

Originally Posted by Rich Struck

It is unethical and scummy. How would you like it if the tables were turned?

[garyv]

Originally Posted by ptlhost

1) You didn't purchase that domain without knowing about it but with one purpose to take what the owner is paying for - and no i won't consider it stealing if you didn't know about the person mistake and purchased that domain

If it were actually "stealing" - then whether or not you knew about it would make no difference in a judges eyes. - That's why this is not stealing.

And no I didn't purchase that domain with the purpose of taking what that owner paid for. The purpose of the domain was for taking what he was throwing away. Big difference.


I think more than exposing ethics here, this thread is exposing an ignorance as to how Google Adwords and Pay Per Clicks work. HIS money is already gone to Google, whether I pick-up his misdirected traffic or not. Even if I didn't register that url - He would still be out the SAME amount of money.

Another Scenario - I'm sitting outside of a pay carwash - I notice that one of the water hoses is misdirected, and overshooting the car. I try to contact the car's owner - but they are no where to be found. I try to contact the carwash owner, but they are too slow to react. Would it be stealing if I parked my car next to the carwash receiving a free car wash from the overshooting hose? That water is coming out no matter what I do. It can either hit the ground and be wasted - or it can be used.

Same with the traffic -The traffic has already been directed. It can either be used, or go to nowhere.

[embrown]

All I have to say is: if the OP didn't do it, somebody was going to do it. People do it all the time, misspelled or similar domains names are one example of taking advantage of it.

This reminded me of a blog post I read. There's a prepared visa/mastercard available for walmart shoppers, the walmart money card. This guy registered the domain name: wwwwalmartcard.com because Walmart hadn't done so already. Notice, that domain name lacks the period (.) between the www and walmart, a common typo. Most major retailers have redirects on those domains and common misspellings. Check wwwamazon.com, for example. It goes right to the Amazon main page. So, even if you did leave the period out, you may not have noticed.

Just imagine how much money he could have made if he was a scammer. Well, my point is that someone's gonna find away to do bad things, due to someone's else's mistake. Its better for someone who doesn't have a scam in mind (I hope the OP, doesn't) to get the traffic rather than someone who does.

[Troy_Phillips]

One Sunday morning the preacher says .

Brothers and sisters confession is good for the soul . Who would like to start the confessions ?

A lady stands up in the back and says she had been having impure thoughts .

Preacher say ... tell it like it is sister ... tell it like it is

A gentleman states that he cursed a lot when he smashed his finger .

Preacher gets in a tizzy and say ... tell it like it is brother ... tell it like it is ...

This little old man in the back gets caught up in all the excitement and stands up and proclaims

Preacher I made love to a goat .

Preacher looks at him and says ... brother I don't think I would have told that .

Smart... yup

ethical .... only you can answer if it is acceptable in your moral code

I am not passing judgment one way or the other cause in the long run it is non of my affair .

But I am kind of like the preacher . Sometimes it is smartest to keep some things to yourself .

[Bill Farnham]

Originally Posted by garyv

I think more than exposing ethics here, this thread is exposing an ignorance as to how Google Adwords and Pay Per Clicks work. HIS money is already gone to Google, whether I pick-up his misdirected traffic or not. Even if I didn't register that url - He would still be out the SAME amount of money.

All moral/ethical points aside, when I run an Adwords campaign and my QS drops my CPC rises and that given keyword is disabled by Google until I raise my bid, and/or raise my quality score.

To contend that a dead page would keep costing your competitor money doesn't make much sense to me.

It is clear to me that if you create a page where the QS is sufficient your competitor will keep spending his ad budget, and this will be a direct result of your intervention.

There's no free water hitting the ground here.

KJ

[John Willer]

Nothing unethical about that!

[newBum76]

Definitely not unethical. This is competition, it's their own fault for making the silly mistake, maybe they'll learn a good lesson and up their game.

[CmdrStidd]

To everyone that is calling this stealing or unethical or just plain wrong:

I have a question for you. You find a competitor has made his entire sales page out of different sections of flash and that they have no real text on their page at all. They are getting a PR of 8.

Do you go to them and tell them what their mistake is? No, you don't. Instead you do a better job on your sales page so you get a rank of 3 or 2 instead. Therefore, by your own logic, you are unethical and stealing and scumbags and every other mean thing you call the OP. You are monopolizing on the mistakes of your competition. That is exactly what he did, what Toyota does, what Nintendo does and every other company in the free world does.

It is called good business. Now, unless you are telling your competition about all the mistakes they have with their copy and sales pages, you are no better than the OP. Plain and simple.

Now, start telling the truth and shaming the devil, the only reason you are saying it is unethical and whatnot is because you did not think of it first. Well, neither did I but you don't see me pissing in his post toasties. I salute the man for catching the opening and moving in for the interception just like on Monday Night Football on ABC.

Oh, I guess the LBs in Football are unethical when they intercept the pass, or in soccer when one takes the ball away from the opponents player, or when the runner steals second on a wild pitch and the list goes on and on and on.

[Bill Farnham]

Originally Posted by SingleMom

The one thing that confuses me on this whole subject is - and this is if my memory serves me correctly as I don't use Google anymore - doesn't the Google campaign management software 'automatically' check your links for validity when you attempt to post a new campaign? And don't they check the site, too, for correct keywords and content to match your ad?

I just don't see how the ad could have been approved originally if the link was not a valid link to a valid site.

As for ethical, or unethical, it is not for me to say. But being a struggling single mother I would be devastated at a loss such as this if it were my campaign.

What if you had hired an incompetent PPC pretender to run your campaign for you?

And I agree with you on Google checking the links. That part really is confusing.

KJ

[Talinn]

The term ethics works differently with marketers and Internet marketers in general. I don't want to offend any affiliates here doing this but I think most people would consider "creating a story like 'how I lost weight' or 'how I got my ex back' around a product that you have never used or maybe never ever seen, and hyping it up and then selling it and making a profit off of it" highly unethical.

On a somewhat different note, I was hosting an affiliate site for a "get your ex back" product. Needless to say I hadn't used the product (although I had seen my review copy) but I was promoting it anyway. Then something happened and I was nearly in tears, I don't know why. My site was a Wordpress blog and from Statpress I saw that someone had searched for "miss my ex girlfriend hugely" in Google and came to my site.

"Miss my ex girlfriend hugely"... it struck something within me, I would contact him and say, if I could: "man I am so sorry for you, I hope you get your ex GF back, and don't believe anything I wrote in this site, I didn't get an ex back with this product, lets meet and have a beer, man"

Well that's probably because I was dumped by an ex and was nearly committing suicide because of it (I know, I'm silly). I have gotten over it but I know exactly what "missing your ex girlfriend hugely" meant.

Maybe I'm super silly but I'm now having second thoughts about continuing to run that site.

[sdcast]

yeah, that's pretty smart

[Sheryl Polomka]

This is a hard one, but as I see it, that person is paying for traffic - people are clicking on his link and going nowhere - he is still paying for the traffic. Regardless of whether you purchased that domain or not, he would still be paying for that traffic, so I don't believe you are doing any harm to him as he'd be paying for that traffic to go nowhere anyway.

Hmmmm, did that make sense????

Having said that.......

Has everyone checked their PPC ads to make sure you have the right links - perhaps it's your ad!!!!!!

[CmdrStidd]

Originally Posted by ptlhost

You are aware that if you would register a domain such as wwwamoson.com you wont have it for long. You know why? because you are profiting of a trademark (stealing that companies marketing efforts) or is that also competition.

Actually, you are wrong here. There is no law that says you cannot own the domain name of amoson.com or anything else like that since their trademark is not on that but on amazon.com. The only way you would get into trouble is if you then pretended to be amazon.com which is where the fraud would come in.

Since he has not ever said that he is pretending to be this other company, but rather is only utilizing his competitors mistakes to his advantage, which is the very essence of marketing any products that are similar, he is not under the label of fraud. I doubt that he has made his site to look exactly like his competitors site would have looked, or does look like, nor is he passing himself off as his competitor, or at least he has not told us that is what he is doing so he is within all legal boundaries. As I stated before, he is doing nothing that the linebacker at the football game who intercepts a pass is doing nor any of the other examples I listed in my previous post.

[Will_Surren]

For the ones who think this is unethical. Say I work on a website for 2 years and know only a little about SEO. I have a site that has links all over but I have not done well with with keywords. I don't renew my domain and someone comes along and grabs the domain and slaps up some content using proper SEO and starts profiting from my previous work in link building. Now is that unethical? No not at all that is smart business.

This is no different than grabbing up phone numbers of competition. If you are running a widget repair shop in your town and your competition that runs a widget repair shop goes out of business and you request their phone number from the phone company, you think that is unethical? No!!! Just smart business and it is used everyday by successful marketers online and off.

[embrown]

Originally Posted by ptlhost

So i suppose you dont know that all these domain that was registered in this fashion was removed legally from the original people registering the wwwamazon.com wwwvisa.com etc. from companies such as amazon etc.

You are aware that if you would register a domain such as wwwamoson.com you wont have it for long. You know why? because you are profiting of a trademark (stealing that companies marketing efforts) or is that also competition.

I never said registering a misspelling was just competition, in fact I don't think I mentioned competition at all in that post. I was just pointing out that people can do much, much worst if given an opening and even big companies, such as Walmart, provide those openings.

Plus, that site still exists. Most likely because they are not claiming to be Walmart, just complaining about how much their security sucks: This is not the Walmart Money Card website

[garyv]

Originally Posted by ptlhost

And you still havent replied to my last question- as you know the domain name did you goto the domain and contacted the owner

All planned - as a compasionate person i would have tried to contact the owner via his site, google or whois. Failing that i would have register the domain and redirected the traffic to the correct domain.

I believe I've answered that one several times now. There was no contact info on the website at all, and the whois was privatized. So I had no way of contacting this person.

And if I redirected traffic for all of the misspelled urls I find online I'd be broke. I'm in this for the money.

I don't steal, I don't spam, I don't do b-l-a-c-k-hat. But I'm not nice enough - or rich enough - to spend $10 registering domains for everyone that doesn't know how to spell. If you want to be the Mother Teresa of the Internet that's ok with me, I'd actually donate money to your cause. But I can't afford to do that myself.

[Max Whitson]

Business is business.

This is like saying is it unethical to past someone in a race when he is slower than you..

[derekwong28]

What I am really worried here is that you have affected the quality score of his campaign. Before then, the url was going nowhere and it was possile that his campaign would be slapped by Google i.e. price per click raised to such an extenet that it would stopped. Now you have put a site there, the quality score would increase and this would allow his campaign to go on.

In this case, the explanation that you are simply collecting clicks that would otherwise been useless would not hold. You are making him pay much more for that mistake for your benefit.

[rowenalee]

Competition is extremely tight in the internet world so I don't think it is unethical and I believe it is a smart way. Continue your journey.

[garyv]

Originally Posted by derekwong28

What I am really worried here is that you have affected the quality score of his campaign. Before then, the url was going nowhere and it was possile that his campaign would be slapped by Google i.e. price per click raised to such an extenet that it would stopped. Now you have put a site there, the quality score would increase and this would allow his campaign to go on.

In this case, the explanation that you are simply collecting clicks that would otherwise been useless would not hold. You are making him pay much more for that mistake for your benefit.

That's actually a good argument - someone else also said that above. However the business being conducted by this url, is measured in conversions. So they would be conducting their business based on ROI (return on investment) Therefore they'd stop their campaign at the same spending point either way. They may have just hit their spending point a little faster if their quality score went down. Either way their spending will end up being the same - at least this way they can find out without having to build their quality score back up. I may actually be saving them some money.

[garyv]

Originally Posted by ptlhost

WoW now that a compassionate statement "saving them money"

Bottom line is you are taking what is not yours and you know it and that makes it unethical. Call it what you want, justify it as much as you want but you know it is wrong.

Actually it is mine. I paid for the domain, and he's sending the traffic to me. I'm not taking it. He's sending it. If someone sends something to you, that is not stealing.

Yes I asked if you thought it was unethical, and you do you've made that clear. And I'm absolutely fine that you think that way. You're obviously in the minority here.

[Rich Struck]

Edit - Forget it, this is pointless.

[Bill Farnham]

Gary,

You sure started a fire storm with this thread.

What's the most striking thing about the responses here has nothing to do with ethics or morality.

What's striking is how many posters display the inability to think clearly, and demonstrate that by the analogies they use. Some of them miss the mark so far it's frightening to think they want to go out on their own and face the world.

With the exception of a few, it's easy to argue that on the despicability scale your actions barely make a blip. This is hardly a crime.

What also strikes me as odd is that if you had posted that someone was siphoning off your Adwords clicks and directing it to a site that mimicked your site's name you would have seen some of the same posters gnashing their teeth and wailing in outrage that some scoundral would do that to you. We've all seen these threads and the reactions.

On a last note, the quote below states facts not in evidence. For all you know that competitor hired out the job to some knucklehead who couldn't manage a PPC campaign if their life depended on it, and now they are a double victim, for lack of a better word.

Originally Posted by garyv

That's actually a good argument - someone else also said that above. However the business being conducted by this url, is measured in conversions. So they would be conducting their business based on ROI (return on investment) Therefore they'd stop their campaign at the same spending point either way. They may have just hit their spending point a little faster if their quality score went down. Either way their spending will end up being the same - at least this way they can find out without having to build their quality score back up. I may actually be saving them some money.

Can't wait to see this as a WSO.

KJ

[garyv]

Killer Joe - I think that we are close on this one. I'll admit that the scenario on it's face looks "slightly" unethical. {emphasis on slightly} Otherwise I wouldn't have asked the question. But it's no where near a crime or thievery.

I can see how some would come to that conclusion based on their thinking. I just think that they don't know enough about the scenario to come to a clear thinking conclusion. Wow - did I say think in that paragraph enough?

Anyways - no hard feelings anyone. I'm normally a very generous guy, however like was said above, I guess I never should have told everyone that I screwed the goat!