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AdWords Warriors - I Need Cloaking Advice

by Summertime Dress
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello Warriors. AdWords & Cloaking question...

Will Google disapprove an ad if the cloaking occurs on the landing page itself and not in the ad?

For example, on my landing page, I'd like to bypass the vendor's site and direct link to Clickbank checkout via a cloaked link.

<a href="www.mydomain.com/clickbank-product-checkout.html">Buy Now< /a>

Does Google consider this a violation of terms?


I currently have no problems running an Adwords campaign with direct linking to checkout -- but the vendor supplied the direct link and it shows my affiliate id (non-cloaked).

Wisdom???
#advice #adwords #cloaking #warriors
  • Profile picture of the author csmcmanus
    anytime you get into cloaking something, it can lead to a TOS violation.
    Best practices on your ads (according to G) is to land on a page before check out. And it does say that you can not redirect the clicker...
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  • Profile picture of the author Wesley Atkins
    This will be fine... Your only cloaking people after they have visited the landing page.

    Your just preselling the visitor and probably doing a better job than the merchant, so your sending them directly to the checkout page to make a purchase...

    You should have no problem with this at all...

    Nothing in the TOS to say this is an issue :-)
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  • Profile picture of the author tryinhere
    Yes you can do that but here is your problem, the display URL must match the display URL,

    so lets say you have a site / land page - www. bluewidgets. com - then the destination URL must land on that tld / ie it must somewhere have - bluewidgets. com - in the page that destination URL takes you to.

    in your case i am not sure if thats how a CB payment page works ? is it placed onto that tld ?

    let me check one - / OK the answer is no the CB payment page rests on CB itself - so to answer your question it is yes and no.

    it is no if want to display www. bluewidgets. com and send them to a tld of www. clickbank. com as that will violate the ad terms and cause a error in the ad being run

    how ever in tech land you could do a display name like

    bluewidgets. clickbank. com - and then use that destination URL to take them through to the payment page

    the problem then becomes one of user value and i see no user value in landing a customer wham bam on a payment page, there is nothing but a please pay now, so your copy comes down to around 95 chars worth of words in the ad itself, and i doubt you would pick a quality score above 1 / 10 for your efforts resulting in a campaign that will cost you to much to run, if it ever did run.
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    • Profile picture of the author Summertime Dress
      Hey there, just to clarify my original inquiry...

      I run a PPC ad --> someone clicks on the ad --> goes to mydomain.com (relevant landing page related to the ad).

      On the landing page, there is product info, etc. --> at the bottom of the landing page is a "Buy Now" link.

      It is *this* Buy Now link that is cloaked to direct link to ClickBank checkout (in order to hide my hoplink in the menu bar).

      So, there's no PPC ad ---> ClickBank checkout which I agree would be a horrible value

      Does this make sense?

      On a similar note, can I have a cloaked link on this same landing page from the image of the product to the vendor's site?

      My main concern is the "no cloaking"
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