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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

I don't usually enjoy articles in the SEO category, but I skimmed this out of idle curiosity and was rewarded by the amusing example showing how ebay paid for ads saying

  Vomit Sale!
  New and used vomit!
  Check out the deals now!

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It gets worse:

    Black People!
    New and used Black People!
    Check out the deals now!

I'm fairly certain there is a filter of some kind because the first time I saw this circling the internet I wasn't able to replicate the "screenshot" of the ad. Still, it didn't take long to find a substitute phrase that was substantively identical but successfully triggered the dynamic keyword insertion ad.

I remember seeing those ads when I searched for "toilet paper"

I shuddered at the though of buying used toilet paper.

When my team is testing new AdWords functions or whatever, we like to pick a funny keyword like that, which is also guaranteed to have no one competing against us, so we can easily view our ad in the #1 spot. Sometimes Amazon will actually outbid us on ads for things like "Pre-Chewed Bubblegum" or whatever stupid phrase we've chosen that week. It's always funny to see. You can't even be angry that your ad isn't visible when that happens.

They're using dynamic keywords in the worst possible way. Often times the landing pages will be empty, junk, or misleading.

What that means is that they will form an ad around your query targeted to a particular page on eBay, often times insensitive to the existing inventory or improperly matched.

Compare this to Amazon's dynamic keyword campaigns, which usually only trigger when they have relevant inventory, and match to a dynamically generated page that does its best to match the inventory results to the query. This is not easy to do, but not impossible, either. eBay looks to just set up their dynamic campaigns and scream #yolo.

This is the best article written about their terribleness: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-n...

I used to work on buying keywords at eBay 10 years ago, and one of the first features we built was a suppression list to prevent exactly this, so I'm a little surprised to see this. These ads can be costly, embarrassing, or carry a legal liability. It's possible they dropped the ball with a big bug that no one noticed, but it's also possible an affiliate was buying these ads hoping to turn a conversion.

eBay should have shut down these affiliates years ago; they're not adding marginal value and they hurt the brand, because it lets any moron associate a crappy ad message with eBay's name.

Does that count as false advertising? Can you just say "I am selling X on my site" even if you aren't?

They do sell "vomit" though:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...

Yes, but they sell plenty of fake vomit: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...

I remember in high school searching for info on the W80 nuclear warhead and seeing a similar ad for "New and used W80 warheads". Not sure what the shipping's like on craters.

I should just note the exclamation points are yours.. Google would disallow any ad with excessive punctuation.

One exclamation point seems to be the limit.

Worse, it seemed that the more esoteric the search term, the more likely it was to show up in one of those goofy ads. I'm not sure if that's actually the case, or if I was just more likely to notice because the dearth of organic results prompted me to pay more attention to the ads.

But, in any case, it was definitely noticeable that they were "spamming" AdWords with worthless ads that frequently led to nowhere useful on eBay's site.

that is the case - because there is ~no one else bidding for those keywords, they are more likely to fall under their (usually very low, relative to competition) maximum bid.

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